


One Inch to the Right

by Quarto



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU series 4, F/M, Mary Lives, Primary Warstan, Rated for violence and language but sadly almost no sex, Secondary Sherlolly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2018-11-22 01:51:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 39,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11370078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quarto/pseuds/Quarto
Summary: The smallest changes can have the largest consequences. We begin in the aquarium, with a bullet and a target. We do not end there.





	1. Prologue

Death is the end of all true stories.

Let's tell a lie instead.

Schrodinger may have been thinking of the many-worlds interpretation as early as 1952, but the first person to truly explicate it was the physicist Hugh Everett, in 1957. Others ran with the concept, and it's quite popular nowadays among scientists and laypersons alike.

At its heart, the many-worlds or multiverse interpretation is an effort to solve a problem in quantum mechanics. All the smallest things in nature appear to have _uncertainty_ built into them. On that very miniscule level, we _cannot_ tell everything that is happening. But out here in the real world, things do, visibly, _happen_. And these things we _can_ see are entirely controlled by these unknowable tiny forces.

It's somewhat like a religion, in that way, but there _are_ very complicated maths involved so it must be true. Just roll with it.

The many-worlds interpretation takes care of that uncertainty by saying that everything that doesn't happen here still happens _someplace_. Every possible wibble of every subatomic particle that can't be measured… wobbled the other way, somewhere. The left-wibble vs. right-wobble universes have split off, an infinity of infinities spiraling off from every single one of these endless infinitesimal motions.

Many of these universes, logic would tell us, are functionally identical to our own. On the macroscopic scale, a single electron in a single hydrogen atom's opting for "up" over "down" doesn't usually make much difference to the price of tea.

Some universes, particularly the ones that split off earlier, must be wildly different. More unlikely. Ones where the asteroid didn't strike and the dinosaurs still walk the earth. Or where _La Resistance_ successfully defeated the Nazis in World War II and set the stage for a two-hundred year dominion of French communists over the world's government. Or where Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are beloved fictional characters invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, appearing in fifty-six short stories and four novels by the same author over the next forty years.

And sometimes, somewhere, the differences are subtle but incredibly significant. A woman sees the threat and starts to move a fraction of a second earlier. Another woman pulls the trigger a fraction of a second later. The bullet still flies on its inexorable trajectory. It still hits its unintended target… just one inch to the right.

In both universes, Mary Watson, forty-one, married, mother of one, ex-covert operative, current nurse, bottle blonde, strikes the floor. In both, she is carried away shortly thereafter.

In one, she's carried away still breathing. Just barely. But breathing.

This is that universe.

The stage is set, the curtain rises. We are ready to begin.


	2. Parodos

This time, when the DVD arrived, two weeks after the aquarium, two weeks after it all changed, Sherlock was alone in Baker Street. The usual suspects who might have been with him… John, Mrs. Hudson, Molly… were all off at St. Thomas' hospital in Lambeth, rallying round. Mary had suffered "a severe setback" early that morning, and she was in the operating theatre. Again.

Sherlock, when _he'd_ been shot, had walked on his own two feet out of the hospital six days afterwards. Admittedly he'd been carried right back in later that same evening, but still. This was, he supposed, the difference between the procedure being carried out by a professional who knew what she was doing and by a rank amateur like Vivian Norbury.

When the DVD fell out of its little padded envelope with its block-lettered "MISS ME?" he felt a surge of the old familiar glee run through his veins.

A _mystery._ A _really_ good one, set up by the single best criminal he had ever encountered. Puzzles to solve, adventures to have, something that he could bloody _fix_ instead of sitting futilely on his hands while his friend tried her hardest to die in a hospital where, he had been clearly informed, his presence was unwelcome. Something to calm the _itch_ that had been building beneath his skin ever since his aborted exile and usually means that he's gearing up to relapse. Something _good_.

It rather deflated him to see Mary's face on the screen of his laptop.

"Thought that would get your attention," Mary said, with a wry smile. Sherlock frowned. When had this been made? Based on her hair it was recent, and Mary was clearly filming herself from an inexpensive mobile phone camera, but the backdrop was entirely unfamiliar to him.

"So, this is in case- in case the day comes. If you are watching this, I'm probably dead. I hope I can have an ordinary life, but who knows? Nothing's certain; nothing's written. My old life – it was full of consequences. The danger was the fun part, but you can't outrun that forever. You need to remember that, so... I'm giving you a case, Sherlock. Might be the hardest case of your career."

Ah. It was when she'd gone haring off into the unknown to draw the deadly attention of her former colleague away from the people she loved, an errand which she had handily survived only to have Sherlock get her gunned down by a _secretary_. But despite everything, it interested him.

"When I'm ... gone – _if_ I'm gone – I need you to do something for me. Save John Watson. Save him, Sherlock. Save him. Don't think anyone else is going to save him, because there isn't anyone. It's up to you. Save him."

Sherlock sighed and wished that it was acceptable to cry. Mary had trusted him, so much, and he knew all too well how misplaced that trust had been. He had set her feet on the road to Samarra, and whether her journey would take her there was still unknown.

"The only way to save John ... is to make him save you. Go to hell, Sherlock."

"Well screw you too, Mary," he murmured, but she went on.

"Go right into Hell, and make it look like you mean it. Go and pick a fight with a bad guy. Put yourself in harm's way. If he thinks you need him, I swear... he _will_ be there."

The video came to an end, and Mary's face froze on the screen. Sherlock sat back in his chair and combed a hand through his hair.

She was wrong even while being right, of course, people mostly were. It had taken him six years, but when he'd let Mary take a bullet meant for him Sherlock had finally, inevitably, broken his relationship with John beyond repair. John _would_ probably still try to save him if he were in danger, yes, but that was because that was what John did. He saved people. It was sort of his _thing_.

But Mary hadn't died, at least not yet. John was therefore fine and not in need of any hypothetical salvation that Sherlock was capable of providing. He didn't even have any "bad guys" on the radar at the moment. Moriarty was dead. Magnussen was dead.

Though of course, he _could_ just... make a bad guy. That was always easy for him. There was one at the point of every needle.

In fact, the more Sherlock thought about it, the better the idea seemed. It even appealed to the bone-deep poetic sensibility that he would never admit to having. Mary had protected Sherlock from the consequences of his actions when she'd jumped in front of him at the aquarium. This, in a way, would accept those consequences back onto his own shoulders where they belonged. And if the worst happened, and John did lose Mary… he would be ready to take her case.

Sherlock Holmes was never particularly good at self-analysis. The idea that he was, again, using a case as an excuse to do something he wanted to do anyway never once occurred to him. He sent a text to Bill Wiggins and settled down to wait for a reply.

* * *

The critical care unit at St. Thomas' gave an impression of overwhelming whiteness. Bright white lights. Crisp white sheets. Ashy greyish-white skin.

Her lips were chapped again. John pulled the tube of her coconut-mango lip balm from his pocket and dabbed some on, finding as always that it was extremely clumsy to do this to another person.

Then a bit of color, bright green eyes opening up in a pallid face, and a rough whisper.

"Hi John."

"Hi, Mary," John said, sitting back down. He spoke quietly but didn't whisper back, because he wanted her to hear him over the machines making the noises that say "patient isn't dead yet" until they get the opportunity to be even louder to say "patient is dying."

"M'hungry," she mumbled.

John glanced up at the milky white fluid being dripped into her veins. The total parenteral nutrition was keeping her alive but couldn't provide her any satisfaction since it bypassed the gut. She felt like she was _starving_.

"I know," John said, patting her hand, "We'll get you something to eat in a little bit."

This was a lie, but it wasn't the first time the two of them had had this identical discussion since they'd withdrawn her sedation. Mary tended to get agitated when he told her the truth, which was that he had no idea when she was going to get back on food, and he just… he really wasn't up for another round of "Fun with ICU psychosis" this morning. The weeks-long course of her recovery had _not_ been smooth.

"Okay," Mary looked around her, blinking owlishly, and asked, "Am I... in hospital?" She was still confusional, which was, he reminded himself, an improvement. Though they wouldn't know if she'd survived without permanent neurological insult until she could be weaned off the massive amounts of painkillers she was taking.

"Yeah."

John could tell she was trying her hardest to think through the haze of opiates and pain, and eventually she asked, slowly and slurred, "Did- did I have another baby?"

"No, you had-"

Well, what _had_ she had? A cardiac arrest in the ambulance, for starters. Then an emergency thoracotomy to fix the damage the bullet had done, a procedure with such a low success rate that John tended to categorize it under the heading "mutilating a corpse." Aaron Becker, the duty surgeon the night Mary was shot, had actually been a senior house officer with John back in their Barts days. He'd always been an arrogant twat with a god complex, even by the generous standards of young trauma surgeons, and had gone ahead with the operation regardless. And she'd lived. Somehow.

After the surgery, Becker had come out to John as he sat staring into a cold cup of coffee in the waiting room. The sentence, "I wouldn't have, but, you know, wife of a friend and with such a young child, I had to try," may have been used during this meeting. Joe Bell, the consultant who had been in charge of the SHOs, would have given him the dressing-down of a lifetime for shit bedside manner. John himself was tempted to punch him in the face, except for the fact he _had_ performed a miracle in saving Mary.

Then an induced coma. Pneumonia, not exactly an unexpected event after a thoracotomy, but still. Extubation. A surprise hemothorax that had required another emergency surgery. Reintubation. A PICC line infection. John couldn't even remember what else, there had been so much and he was exhausted.

And now after all that they were _here_ , and all John could say was, "You got hurt."

"How?" she asked.

"You jumped in front of a bullet," John dryly informed her. She might not remember it but the event was _very_ clear in John's mind.

"Oh. Well that wasn't very clever of me. Why'd I do that?" she said, all innocent wonder.

John gritted his teeth. Because that asshole couldn't resist showing off his own cleverness, damn what it did to everyone around him. Sherlock had tried to visit Mary, once, and John had told him in no uncertain terms _exactly_ where he could go.

"You'll never have to do it again," he said, finally.

"Good. That's... good."

Mary's nurse came up behind him, cleared her throat, and said, "Doctor Watson, we need to clear the unit for shift change."

"Okay," John replied. He stood and brushed a quick kiss onto Mary's forehead. "I've got to go to work, but I'll be back this afternoon, soon as I'm done. Be good for Doctor Kamerkar when she makes rounds today… they're talking about moving you into step-down and then I can bring Rosie to visit."

"That'd be… so nice," Mary said, already mentally leaving John for the drugged haze where she spent most of her time.

John cleaned his hands with antibacterial foam, put on his coat and retrieved his mobile from the nurse's station on the way out of the ward. He walked out of the hospital into the foggy December morning. The sun wouldn't be truly up for another hour, and fairy lights glittered everywhere in the quiet streets of Lambeth. Christmas was coming, Rosie's first, and there was no way Mary would be home to see it. He folded his hands into fists.

New year, new life, John decided. He was going to get his wife well again. He was going to be a better man. He was going to protect his family. And he was, once and for all, _done_ with Sherlock Holmes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic will by necessity contain significant quantities of dialogue and situations taken from "The Lying Detective" and "His Last Vow" by Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss and I will try to call that out wherever I can. In this chapter, Mary's entire DVD speech is theirs, not mine. I always try to have an accurate timeline in my fics but S4 made it impossible, so for the record what I will be using is: Rosie's birth late January/early February 2015,"The Six Thatchers" over summer/fall, culminating in Mary's return to England and shooting sometime in mid November. My beta readers were the fanfic mavens allthebellsinvenice and mizjoely, and wonderful tumblristas theleftpill and iamthemaddness. For what's good in this give them the credit.


	3. Insomnia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reader warning: This chapter contains mention of a suicide attempt and the death of a child. Just to get us kicked off in fully cheery mode. Neither character is one we know but feel free to skip if you’d rather just not.

It was the hallucinations that finally convinced John that he needed to get back into therapy.

Specifically, it was the one of his wife standing in the corner of his surgery, scowling at him and saying, "You need to get back into therapy."

He ignored her. He knew he just needed a bit of rest.

"Yeah, no," Mary replied to his unspoken thoughts, "Needing some rest is one thing, insomnia on this level is very much another. You're going to kill someone."

No worries there, John thought, he was a mild-mannered suburban GP. Everything else was over and done with.

"You _just_ wrote a prescription for prednisone for Mr. Kelly's tachycardia."

John, slowly, pulled the screen of the EMR back over and read over his notes.

"You _meant_ to type propanolol," Mary said helpfully, "Which is what he has been _taking_ for his tachycardia, because, you know, it actually works to treat it. As opposed to prednisone, which doesn't. And which we don't give him, generally, since he's diabetic and it _can_ cause sudden rises in blood sugar but I'm sure you didn't just make a _really_ unforgivable mistake."

John bolted out of his office after the departing Mr. Kelly, hearing, quite clearly, Mary calling merrily, "But he probably wouldn't _actually_ die! The _pharmacist_ would likely catch it!"

Thus after getting the right prescription to the right patient, and getting an intolerably understanding talking-to by the head of the practice, John pulled up a list of the nearest therapists on the NHS's internal website. He didn't want to go back to Ella-

"Because Sherlock thinks she's a qua-ack," Mary singsonged.

Because there was too much history there and John was all about the fresh starts, now. There were four men and one woman, Doctor Inga Braun, within cycling distance, and he chose the woman after brief consideration. He'd always felt more comfortable talking to women than men, and that held true for his therapist preferences. Her first available slot was two days later.

Two days and nights passed. Two days in which John visited the _real_ Mary in hospital, went to work and looked after Rosie, all while feeling so fatigued it was like he was about a quarter inch separated from any of it. Two nights of fitful catnaps inevitably ending with his bolting awake, heart racing, where he sat in the dark by Rosie's crib and listened to her quiet breathing and tried not to think.

The new trick cyclist was youngish, with prematurely grey hair. She practiced out of her home and seemed faintly familiar to John, although that was probably because she was almost a caricature of a therapist, all long skirts and chunky jewelry and rimless spectacles and soothing mannerisms. She even had a nice little Sigmund Freud sort of accent.

As always on the first visit to a new therapist, John had to provide a little capsule autobiography and psychiatric history. In his specific case, this took a while. Midway through, Doctor Braun looked at the clock hanging over his head and said, "Well, I don't have anyone on after you, so I suppose we can run a bit long today."

He finished up. Doctor Braun looked at her notepad and said, "Well, there's obviously a lot to unpack here, but let's start with the proximate cause. What was the specific reason you decided to return to therapy?"

"The insomnia's starting to affect my work," John replied.

"Oh for God's sake. Just tell her that you're hallucinating about your wife yelling at you, you asshole," Mary suggested. John looked away from her.

"You haven't taken time off work to deal with all this?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm a GP. If I don't work I don't get paid, and I've got this weird fondness for making rent and buying food." If anything John was working _more_ than he used to, since all the financial estimates that had gone into choosing their flat had assumed two incomes. The six months of maternity leave Mary had taken for Rosie had been a pinch, but they'd managed it because Sherlock had gotten unusually sensitive and practical and started insisting John accept a share of his eyewateringly high fees on the cases that they worked together. Obviously that wasn't an option any longer.

"Do you have friends or family who can give you financial help?"

One thing John had noticed since Mary had been in hospital was how few people, financially helpful or otherwise, were really in his life. There was Harry, but if she couldn't even be arsed to show up to his wedding he would be damned before he went crawling to her again now that times were hard. Mike and Molly, yes, but because he was finding it incredibly difficult to leave Rosie with anyone who _didn't_ have an MD they were already holding the bag for him more than he liked. Mrs. Hudson, but she was Sherlock's more than his. That was basically _it_.

"No," he said.

"Not Sherlock Holmes?"

"I don't see Sherlock any more," John said, precisely. The therapist raised her eyebrows at this, and then decided to move on.

"I see your GP prescribed you ten milligrams of zolpidem. Has that been helpful?"

"Not really," John replied, "It puts me out for about two hours but then I wake right back up again." Also he was concerned about mixing Ambien and alcohol, which was sort of starting to become a _thing_ again… but one problem at a time.

"What are you thinking about, when you first wake up?"

John considered for a moment, and then said, "Death."

"Your death?" Therapists are always interested in you when they think you're suicidal.

"No," John said. His death held no particular terrors any longer. There were worse things.

"Whose then?"

John inhaled, and said slowly, "I always have to go check and see if Rosie's… if Rosie's still breathing. The baby monitor isn't sensitive enough that I can hear if she is or not."

"Rosie is… ten months old, correct? And healthy? Not at any particular _risk_ for a cot death."

The fact that someone besides him had said "cot death" out loud was an inexpressible weight off John's mind. He liked Doctor Braun, he decided.

"Johnny-boy's got a crush," Imaginary Mary cooed. He. _ignored._ her.

"I had a patient once, back in Afghanistan. Her son… perfect, healthy little boy, born at term, no respiratory problems, no smokers in the house, _none_ of the standard risk factors. Then his dad went in to wake him one morning and he was blue. She'd cut her wrists, and when I was patching her up she kept asking why I wouldn't just let her die. And now I can't stop thinking about that."

Doctor Braun looked at him with her deep dark eyes, and said, "You don't feel like the people that you love are safe."

John laughed bitterly.

"Well, yeah. Cause they _aren't._ Nothing's safe. The second you think that it's otherwise is right when you find out how _bloody_ wrong you are."

Like the times when your best (hell, only) friend comes back from the dead and you're happy and about to get engaged and then you get drugged and put into a bonfire. Or when you think her enemies are dead and the worst thing in your future is confessing your infidelity to your wife and then you get to watch her try to breathe around the bullet in her chest.

"Insecurity and fear are both _very_ typical reactions to traumatic experiences like the ones you have been through," she said, "Though it's always _fascinating_ to observe how different people respond to the same stimulus. But this _is_ something which we can work on… knowing how to manage it in a productive way, knowing which fears are valid and which ones the mind is constructing for you, and how to keep these negative emotions from spilling over into other areas of your life where they may or may not be relevant."

Dr. Braun made a few notes, then asked, "Is that all?"

John frowned, "Isn't that… enough?"

"Certainly it _is_ , but at the same time I can't help but notice that you keep glancing over my shoulder. What are you looking for?"

John glanced. Mary shrugged at him.

"Just… looking away," he said.

"All right, then," she said, with (again, weirdly familiar) brusqueness, "Averting the gaze means avoidance, deceit, or concealment. But you did choose to come here and talk with me, and while I do assume all my patients will eventually try to keep things from me if not outright lie, I haven't even asked you about sex or substance abuse yet."

"Oooh. You've found another _noticer_ ," Mary said.

"You're observant," John said, flatly, "Reminds me of someone I know."

"Sherlock Holmes?"

"Yep," he said, popping the "p."

"And I don't believe you consider that to be a flattering comparison."

"Look, I imagine being really perceptive is _very_ useful for a therapist, and I don't mind that you've clearly heard of me," John bit out, "But honestly all I'm after here is a fresh diagnosis... what I'm thinking is some sort of panic disorder, though I'll defer to your expertise. And then I'd like some CBT or some EMDR or some handy exercises that I can take home so I can bloody start to calm the hell down and get some sleep. If I wanted someone to _deduce_ me I'd go over to Baker Street or wherever he's hiding and talk to _Sherlock_. Frankly he's better at it than you are."

John was probably imagining the split second when Doctor Braun looked _incredibly_ pissed off at that last sentence. He really needed some rest. Envisioning one woman being mad at him was quite enough. All she replied was, "Why haven't you? Are you angry with him?"

"No, I'm not angry any more. I've got other things to worry about now. I've moved on."

"Has he?"

"I can only assume so, yes. His brother phoned me a few weeks ago to let me know he was out and about again. And he's really hard to avoid when he wants something."

"You're averting your gaze again," Doctor Braun said, "Evasion or deceit?"

"Neither," John said, "It's just… can _you_ hear that?"

Doctor Braun cocked her head to listen, but the sound quickly grew so loud that it soon became unnecessary. It was sirens… and a helicopter, very near at hand. John stood and walked to the front door, Doctor Braun following behind curiously.

Through the quiet streets of Twickenham, he could hear the noisy revs of a V8 engine. A car was approaching at speed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It takes surprisingly little sleep deprivation to make you hallucinate. I’m taking a bit of artistic license in how detailed and coherent said hallucinations are likely to be because John is, after all, a fictioneer.


	4. Vantage

Due to an infelicitous combination of precipitous labor, a dead zone in the mobile network, and an enormous jellyfish in the tide pools at Sussex, John had delivered his own daughter while pulled over to the side of the M25. He'd wrapped the tiny, perfect Rosie up in his jacket and handed her over to her mother. Mary had been crying, John had been crying, Rosie had been crying, Sherlock had been… well, faintly traumatized-looking, but also misty, and up until this second John would have said that moment was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life.

Mrs. Hudson's red Aston Martin Vantage was making him reevaluate that opinion. John wasn't even a cars guy, really. He himself drove a sensible black high-fuel-economy hatchback. The Vantage was just so… _shiny_.

She'd made a bootlegger's turn onto the narrow drive, slamming the side panel into Doctor Braun's bins, then climbed out, blown off the policeman who had been chasing her, and pulled John into a hug.

"What's happened? What's wrong?" John asked, though it was obviously Sherlock, it always was, really none of their problems could be extracted from his existence.

"It's Sherlock!" she replied. Obviously. "You've no idea what I've been through."

John sighed, dragged his eyes away from the car, and nodded at the bemused therapist.

"What's he done? Do you need the police?"

"I'm not having the _plod_ in _my_ house making things worse!" Mrs. Hudson said in tones of outraged dignity, "I'm not a civilian, I don't talk to the _cops_ just because someone's ill. And he _is_ , John, he's so unwell. He's not eating, nor sleeping. And he's-"

She lowered her voice, "He's on the drugs again. And he was waving a gun about, oh, Lud, I was terrified. He's gotten some sort of fixation on Culverton Smith-"

John rubbed his eyes, and asked, "From telly?"

"This- from this morning, may be relevant," Doctor Braun said from behind them. She showed them the screen of her mobile and John realized why she had been so interested in Sherlock this whole time. He'd made the _news_.

"Sherlock thinks _Culverton Smith's..._ a serial killer?" John chuckled, "The bloody talent show host? I _knew_ I shouldn't have got him set up on twitter."

Mrs. Hudson slapped his shoulder with an open palm and snapped, "Stop it. It's not funny."

"It's a _bit_ funny. Look, Mrs. Hudson-"

"You have to help him, John. He needs you."

"No," John said succinctly.

"I know you're angry about Mary but do you _really_ think that this is how she wants you to behave?"

"Hint," Mary chimed in, " _No_."

John bristled at that. _Everything_ he was doing was about Mary and he _really_ didn't like being criticized for it. He snapped back, "I don't know how Mary wants me to behave because Mary can't tell me, what with her being doped out of her mind and flayed open like a fish. Call Mycroft. I'm sure he'll be only too happy to pervert the system to get Sherlock out of trouble."

Mrs. Hudson, lip trembling, stared at him, and said, "Hard times don't take away your obligation to be a decent human being, John Watson."

She leaned on the hood of the Aston Martin, buried her face in her hands, and started to cry in loud gulping sobs. John sighed, feeling guilty. Not like he'd exactly been short on that before, but Mrs. Hudson was elderly, and frail, and in no way deserved his snapping at her.

"I'm sorry. But have you talked to Mycroft, or, or Molly, or-"

"He needs _you,_ John," she wailed, "Even just as a doctor. Can't you at least come by to see him?"

Bleeding Hippocratic oath, John thought, exasperatedly. But he supposed it wasn't the worst thing in the world… a quick pop off to Baker Street to see if this latest acting-out was best handled by rehab or jail or a punch to the jaw. Just for the sake of the things Sherlock had done for him when they were friends, and because it _was_ what Mary would want.

"All right," he said, eventually, "I'll go see him when I'm in the neighborhood. Check him out, talk him down."

Mrs. Hudson raised her face from her hands. John noticed it was... _not_ tearstreaked, not at all, as she chirped happily, "Do you promise?"

"Um, yeah, I will," he replied.

"Oh, _good,_ " she said, teetering on absurdly high heels around to the boot, which she popped open with her keyfob, "Off you go, then!"

Sherlock, handcuffed and wearing his dressing gown, was folded up in the boot, and blinked up at John before saying crabbily, "Hello, John. You look like hell."

Of course. Whatever _would_ he do if everyone in his life stopped manipulating him for a few days at a stretch? John extended a hand to Mrs. Hudson without looking at her, and she passed over the handcuff keys.

Uncuffed, Sherlock climbed clumsily out of the boot and staggered right past John into Doctor Braun's house, saying, "Heyyy, new therapist! Brilliant! He's got _so_ many problems."

That stabbing over-the-right-eye "Sherlock" headache was back. John rubbed his forehead.

"How'd you get him into the boot?"

"At gunpoint," Mrs. Hudson told him, calmly.

"Right. Obvious, don't know why I asked. And where'd you get the car from?"

"I keep it garaged over on Glentworth Street."

"That's _your_ car?" John asked. He didn't know quite why he was focusing so hard on the Vantage but it was _really_ hard to ignore it, "I saw it on _Top Gear_ , it costs a hundred thousand pounds!"

"Well, more like one-twenty-five, with that engine and interior package."

"How?"

Mrs. Hudson scowled up at him.

"John, you lived for two years in a grade two listed building which I _own_ in a part of Marylebone where fair market rent on a two bedroom flat of that size and quality would be around six thousand pounds a month. Did I _ever_ charge my unemployed doctor and I-only-work-when-it's-entertaining detective tenants six thousand a month?"

"Um, no."

"Do you know why I didn't?"

"Cause… you liked us?"

"And because I didn't need the money, because I have loads. It's implicit in the word "cartel," dear, really you men do live in a dreamworld sometimes."

With that she slammed the trunk shut and followed Sherlock into the house.

Sherlock had flung himself into the chair John had just recently vacated, and was declaiming to a fascinated Doctor Braun.

"It's unusual, but there _are_ precedents in the literature. Gilles de Rais, a French nobleman who was executed in 1440 for the sexually-motivated killings of over a hundred children. Erzsebet Bathory, Hungarian royalty, murdered at least thirty and perhaps as many as _six_ hundred girls and young women in the late 1500's. When you are, for want of a better word, important… wealthy, noble, or the modern nobility-equivalent, a reality television star… you can get away with it for far longer than your average serial killer. The world itself contorts to protect you. Which makes one wonder how many of them-"

Sherlock trailed off. His hands were shaking, and his skin had a distinctly yellowish tinge. This, John had to admit, looked bad. Even during the Magnussen case when John had dragged him out of a flophouse Sherlock had never before seemed so overtly intoxicated. This was the twenty-five year old Sherlock, before the repeated stints in rehab, before 'the work,' who John had never met but had heard Greg discuss in somber tones.

"How many of them simply have enough self-restraint not to create a Grand Guignol sufficient to draw attention. This is, I believe, what's happened here. Even _I_ had no idea about Culverton Smith," Sherlock shrugged, "Until his daughter came to me with her fears. He operated completely under the radar, and yet in plain sight."

John's phone, in his pocket, beeped. He checked the screen but it was an unknown number, so he was making to ignore it when Sherlock said, "You may want to answer that. It'll be him."

"Him who?" John asked.

"Culverton Smith, obviously. What did I _just_ say?"

"This makes _twice_ now that my mobile number has been given out to serial killers, by you," John pointed out mildly, "You really need to stop that."

But he answered it, anyway. One thing about Sherlock, you never got bored.

"Doctor Watson? Culverton Smith, here," said a familiar oily Geordie-accented voice, just like on television, "Are we all still on to meet this afternoon? The car should be arriving shortly, it'll bring you over, soon as you're ready."

"All… still on?"

"You, me, and _Sherlock Holmes_ , of course," the man said, chuckling, "I've been looking forward to meeting you lot for weeks."

"Weeks?"

"Yeah, he said to send a car for you two up there… what, two weeks ago?"

"But-" A stretch limousine was pulling up outside. John stared at it and said, "We'll- um," before ringing off.

"You gave…" he said slowly, " _This_ address to him. Two weeks ago. I didn't even know _I_ was coming here until two _days_ ago, and you knew you'd be brought here _against your will_ , at gunpoint, at this time."

"Oh, well that was clever, dear, how did you do that?" Mrs. Hudson asked.

"Well, obviously-" Mary and Sherlock began, but John interrupted them.

"No, shut up. I don't care how, I want to know why."

"You _do_ care how," Mary said, "That's the whole point of you."

Sherlock smiled shakily up at John.

"She's right." And for just one terrifying second, John thought Sherlock was seeing Mary too.

"Mrs. Hudson's right. I'm burning out. You can't sustain this sort of intake for long, and I can't... really seem to stop myself anymore. I hadn't intended to let it get quite this far-"

"You _intended_ this?"

Sherlock gazed up at him, appeared to be about to say something, and then changed his mind.

"In any case, I need you to know, John – I need you to see that up here," Sherlock gestured with his hands at his head, "I've still got it, so when I tell you that this is the most dangerous, the most despicable human being that I have ever encountered; when I tell you that this, this _monster_ must be ended, please remember where you're standing, because ... you're standing exactly where I said you would be two weeks ago. I'm a mess, I'm in hell, but I am _not_ wrong, not about him"

John looked down at him, and right then, he _knew_ , and he could feel the blood rushing to his face.

"You're bloody faking it," he said, lowly and intensely.

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you lie to me, _all of you_ lie to me, it's everyone's favorite hobby, but you, Sherlock, are the absolute _master_. This is _exactly_ what you did the last time… 'Oh, John, we're _definitely_ going to die, forgive me for..."

Then he stopped, because Sherlock had rolled up his sleeves to show mottled bruising, around the pinprick injection marks caused by skin-popping.

"Fine," John said, after a few breaths, "They look real."

"They are real. Have a look for yourself. Examine me"

"Nope," John replied, opening up his phone again, "I'm making _Molly_ do it. _She_ sees through your shit."

He knew full well that this was petty and spiteful and would probably hurt Molly a lot more than it did Sherlock, and therefore it wasn't all _that_ obnoxious when Sherlock responded with a wry grin, "You're _really_ not going to like this."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter the lines beginning "It's Sherlock! You've no idea what I've been through" and "I don't care how, I want to know why" and Sherlock's whole "two weeks ago" speech are Gatiss/Moffatt specials. Thanks as always to arianedevere at dreamwidth for her super-useful transcriptions.


	5. Girls

After he'd dispatched Sherlock in his summoned-two-weeks ago ambulance and been told "You couldn't handle the Vantage, dear," John got into the limo. Mary, he thought, would give him endless shit for that, going for a ride in a car owned by a (possibly) bad person. She'd always thought that was a stupid habit of his.

" _Wow_ ," Mary said, from her seat next to him. She sounded, for the first time since being imaginary, not all that hostile.

John sighed, and asked, "What?"

Out loud, apparently, since the driver glanced back at him in the rearview mirror.

"Well those two slept together since the last time you saw him, huh?"

John looked over at Mary, who looked back at him.

"No. Sherlock… he doesn't. Ever."

Mary rolled her eyes at him and the hostility was  _right_  back, and she snapped, "Look, jackass, we've discussed this. I'm a manifestation of your guilt and stress and exhaustion, and so the things that I say are in fact all your own thoughts and it's  _dumb_  to argue with me. He extruded  _all_ his spines when he saw her and made a cheap joke about her handling his balls,  _she's_  back to being all stammery and looked like you broke her bloody heart when you told her he's using,  _ergo_ , they've slept together. Recently. And it went wrong."

"She's not even his type, if he has a type. He likes… I don't know, the Irene Adler sort."

"Yeah. Confident, dangerous, sexually aggressive," Mary laughed, "That's  _his_  type."

There wasn't really much answer to that.

John jerked awake a few minutes later from the micronap the car's motion had soothed him into. Mary hadn't gone, and was curled up on the seat looking out the window. This was an unusually lengthy visitation for her and he was starting to get concerned that he might actually currently  _be_  asleep. The distinction was unclear in his mind at the moment.

"I wonder if it's easy for him," Mary mused, "Sherlock, I mean."

"What?" John asked.

She smiled.

"Sexual continence. 'Cause he's not obliged to, you know. He didn't, for example, stand in front of everyone he knows and  _God_  and pledge lifelong fidelity to one person. The only reason he doesn't,  _if_ he doesn't, is because he's  _decided_  not to. You've seen how women… and men, for that matter… act around him. He could cut a swath through London a mile wide."

"So what?"

"So why does someone do that, if they don't have to? Why would someone want to leave out that whole wonderful part of life?"

"In Sherlock's case? No idea. I never knew. But he's always had a hard time letting other people get close, so… fear, maybe."

"Not love?"

"Same thing," John said, closing his eyes and leaning his head back against the leather-covered headrest. He made the rest of the ride in blissful silence.

* * *

Molly stepped over to him as he sat on the gurney, weaving slightly with the motion of the ambulance. She gently tilted Sherlock's chin up with the tips of her fingers and looked down into his face. Part of him wanted to rest his cheek in her hand, but he just raised an eyebrow quizzically.

"Did you know you've got a touch of anisocoria?" she asked quietly.

Uneven dilation of the pupils.  _That_  was a new side effect, one which he'd seen (but never personally had) with cocaine, so...

"It's probably the scopolamine," he said, after consideration.

"You're taking scopolamine _... recreationally_?" Molly said, "I didn't even realize that was a thing."

"None of this is recreational, Molly, it's for-"

She rolled her eyes at him and scoffed, "Of  _course_. It's for a  _case_. Where's the list?"

"Sarcasm doesn't become you," Sherlock remarked mildly, leaning back to fish it out of his trouser pocket. He passed it over to her, and Molly read over it silently. Then she turned the page over and read the back side. Molly let out a shuddery breath, and put the list away.

"How long has this been going on?" she asked him.

"Oh, is that  _really_  what you want to ask me, Molly?" Sherlock drawled back. He didn't know quite why, he'd been hurtful enough to her already, but there was an empty aching sensation in his chest that probably wasn't entirely the cardiac stress. And "stopping himself" had hardly been his forte lately.

To his surprise, Molly laughed aloud at that.

"Actually no," she replied cheerily, "I mean, I  _am_  a stupid masochist, don't get me wrong or anything, but it doesn't take a deductive genius to figure that one out. Exactly two weeks ago, when you came to my flat, you were high. And then thirteen days ago when you said you had made, and I quote, 'A mistake. A wonderful one, but a mistake,' and left, you'd probably sobered up."

She sat next to him on the gurney, a small solid pressure along his left arm and thigh, and sighed.

"The best bit is I even kind of suspected you were high, at the time, but..." Molly pressed her lips together, folded her hands in her lap, "I mean,  _Rosie_  was there, at first, and y-you held her and talked to her. I didn't think, around  _her_ , that- oh, my God, I actually hid you from John when he came to fetch her because I thought that he was wrong about you. What the hell is the matter with me?"

Molly scrubbed her hands over her face, smudging her makeup, and stood up again. She took two steps away, the farthest she could get from him, and started rummaging through the cabinets.

"I should have made John handle this, I really should, by the time they get to  _me_  the drugs aren't hurting them anymore. I haven't worked A&E since my foundation training, I-I-I'm not sure I remember quite what you do for polydrug intoxication-"

"Molly-" Sherlock began.

"I can draw bloods so we can see what you've done to your kidneys, and liver, and, and for bloodborne diseases... and get you rehydrated," she said, raising her voice to speak over him, "Assuming you've still got an uncollapsed vein I can work with. And… narcan? To block the opiates? N-no, that's wrong, you've not overdosed, I'm  _stupid_ \- valium. Do they even keep valium in ambulances?"

"Molly there is nothing the matter with you and you are not stupid," he snapped.

She paused, a plastic bag in her hand.

"They  _do_  have valium," she said wryly, "But it's the rectal stuff for  _status epilepticus_. Can I tempt you?"

"I'll pass."

She carefully put the medicine back in its spot in the precisely arranged racks.

"Roll your sleeve up and lie down. I'll start the bloods."

Simply for the novelty of it, Sherlock did what Molly wanted. The comedown was starting and he was going to need some sort of maintenance dose in about a half an hour, but at least he could spare her seeing that. She gently swabbed the crook of his elbow with an alcohol wipe and drew four vials of blood, before (despite her supposed lack of recent experience with living patients) starting a saline drip into his abused veins as efficiently and smoothly as he'd ever experienced.

Through the haze of the drugs, he allowed himself to really  _look_  at her. Simple clothes, suitable for the lab or home or whatever unplanned adventure she'd thought she was going on with him today. She'd been happy this morning… she'd gone for a run, made a full cooked breakfast, played with Toby, then taken unusual care with her grooming so that she would look pretty when-

Ah. He disliked when he made this sort of deduction.

"Molly, I do... regret it."

"Just what every girl loves to hear. It's fine. What do you need me to do?"

Sherlock stared up at her serene face and inquired, "Without even asking why?"

She shrugged.

"What would be the point? I'm going to do it, regardless. I always do."

"Why?"

"Because  _somebody_  has to," she snapped, "Somebody has to hold everything together because Mary's in hospital, Rosie needs looking after, John's on the verge of a nervous breakdown… don't know if you noticed that one, but he is  _not_  doing well… and  _you're_  self-medicating again. There's nobody else available, it's just me, I'm doing it. So again, what. Do. You. Bloody. Need?"

Sherlock decided he could just keep on with hating himself, it was so convenient.

"I need Culverton Smith to think that I'm… incapacitated. Weak. A victim. Hence the drugs. And John needs to believe it too since he can't convincingly lie."

"And you were even clever enough to start on the smack before you had any idea he was a serial killer!" Molly chirped sarcastically. He should have known he couldn't get that one past her.

He sighed.

"Before Mary was shot… she sent me a message. She wanted me to be able to help John, if she died. And she knew that the way for that to happen had to be to make John help me, by putting myself in harm's way. This is the best way I know to do that."

Molly's mouth was open. She closed it. Then she opened it again to say "Oh, my  _GOD_."

She rolled her eyes and threw her hands in the air.

"I cannot even with you people anymore. Everything has to be done in the most dramatic way possible. She  _had_ to realize how you'd take that. You know how you could  _actually_  help John, Sherlock? You could sincerely apologize to him for your role in his wife's shooting, point out that you didn't make her take a bullet for you, and then dip into your trust fund and lend him some money so he could take time off work and focus on his family right now. But that's too bloody sensible and straightforward for you."

"I haven't noticed  _you_ doing that," he snapped back, stung.

"He won't take money from  _me,_ I offered," Molly replied, "So I'm giving him about twenty hours of free babysitting a week instead. But  _you're_  his best friend, you ass."

She was wide eyed and kind of shouting at him, now. And exquisitely lovely, that too.

"I don't know why you keep on doing this for us. For me," Sherlock said, after an aching stretch of silence.

"Yes, you do," Molly answered simply. She had a look at the saline bag running into him and tweaked the flow-controller to full-on, "At least this time I won't have to lie to him. You  _are_ incapacitated. If you're right about Culverton Smith then you're doing something incredibly stupid and dangerous."

"Fairly ordinary Thursday, then," Sherlock said, smiling lamely at her.

"It stopped being funny a long time ago, Sherlock," she said.

They made the rest of the ride in silence. As the ambulance drew to a stop, she withdrew the cannula from his vein and bandaged up the pinprick where it had been, an entirely unnecessary amenity given the state of his arms.

Then she opened the rear doors as he started taking off his dressing gown. She  _had_ remembered his coat. His battle dress.

As he slipped into it, he heard John asking, "So how is he?"

"I've seen healthier people on the slab," Molly replied.


	6. Caedwalla

So despite John's initial confusion, this apparently was actually all happening in his real life. Sherlock was using again. Culverton Smith was, if not in fact a serial killer, an incredibly creepy bastard. And John was incidentally starting to realize that he had been a little too self-effacing in the blog because even his actual fan had no idea who he was.

"Mind you, the blog's definitely gone downhill a bit," Nurse Cornish mused, as they all leaned on the wall outside the men's toilets.

"He's shooting up in there, you realize," Mary commented.

"Yes, I know," John replied.

Sherlock strolled out of the bathroom and announced, "I read in a book once that the key to happiness is the pursuit of attainable goals. If this is in fact the case I must say a drugs habit is probably one of the most straightforward ways to accomplish that. So many delightful little moments to look forward to over the course of the day."

"Um," Nurse Cornish said.

"Really tasteful, Sherlock," John replied.

"Funny though. Anyway!" Sherlock rubbed his hands together, "Let's go and meet some children."

Whatever he'd taken had definitely perked Sherlock up. He was _flying_. Another nurse shouted "I love your blog" to him in tones that suggested she was just short of flinging her knickers at his head (there was no moral justice in the universe) as they walked by, and Sherlock gave her two thumbs up and said, "You're welcome."

They rounded the corner into the children's ward and it finally occurred to John that this was an odd thing to be doing… he'd never tried to frame any of the stories on the blog in a way that was suitable for children. And the stuff that made it onto the news tended not to be that family-friendly.

"Sherlock, is this really appropriate for us to be doing? They're sick kids, and the stuff you do's all a bit… scary."

Sherlock looked down his nose at John and inquired, "Haven't you ever read a fairytale, John? Or for that matter watched your daughter eat? Children haven't yet put on the shells of morality and propriety that adults affect and so they'll love me. They live in the state of nature, red in tooth and claw, of predator-"

"Ah, here he is!" Culverton Smith announced, "The famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, and Doctor Watson!"

"And _prey_. Hi kids!"

There was a tentative chorus of high-pitched 'Hello's, and then Smith said, "We're all so glad to have you here, Mr. Holmes, and we'd love to hear about some of your cases."

"No!" Sherlock chirped.

"Yes," John said.

"Yes, right!" Sherlock said, and then went on into a rambling and spoiler-filled version of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in which he revealed that Henry Baskerville had been dosed with a psychotropic gas in the first sentence.

John frowned at him. Sherlock's favorite bit was always the part where he got to mystify people and then show off how clever he had been… but now? He seemed, along with really really high, distracted. Not functioning properly. Like he was detaching himself from the rest of the world and just going through the motions.

"It's easier for you to be angry with him than worried for him, I know, but you should be worried," Mary whispered. She sounded more like his own thoughts than she normally did… and that was a problem, wasn't it? When your mental glitches had a 'normal' and you noticed when they went off-piste?

Even the children were picking up that something was amiss, and when Sherlock trailed off to his rambling conclusion and asked if they had any questions there was a general shaking of heads. Then Smith piped up, " _I've_ got a question, Mr. Holmes. You ever catch a serial killer?"

Sherlock stared at Smith with flat eyes and then said smoothly, "Not yet."

"Why not?"

"They're… serial killers are really rare, kids," John chimed in, because the nurses were looking distinctly leery at the direction this conversation was taking, "It's not like in films, they aren't all over the place."

"There's probably two or three undetected ones in the UK at any given moment," Sherlock corrected him, "But they aren't terribly complicated to catch, or requiring the specialized services that I provide. They're… simple. Dull. Easy to profile, low IQs, social outcasts… their victims tend to be similarly fringe people whose deaths don't attract significant attention and that factor, more than anything else, is what enables them to become serial killers instead of commonplace one-shot. murderous. thugs."

"Yeahhhh," Smith drawled, "Yeah, stupid, weird, pyromaniac, animal torturer, blah blah...but that's only the ones that get caught. I mean, what if you had somebody clever, right? Not on the fringes, but right down at the heart. And he… or she, mind, can't say that girls can't accomplish just as much as boys, eh wot? And he was important, too. Like Prince Charles or somebody. And he wanted to do it. What would you do then?"

It was always interesting to watch Sherlock, who knew that he could be really bizarre in public and other people's manners and restraint would let him get away with it. It was actively creepy to be in a room with two people who knew that.

"Prince Charles is, of course," John interjected again, "Not actually a serial killer, is he, Sherlock?"

John didn't understand his sudden and obscurely English urge to defend the royal family, but Sherlock, unbelievably, shrugged.

"It would be more challenging," he said, "But not impossible. Never impossible."

He and Smith stared, smiling, at one another until finally the older man chuckled and said, "Come on, you lot! Haven't you ever heard a joke before?"

The laugh this line got was unsurprisingly subdued.

They wrapped up the meet-and-greet quietly, and Smith led them through the back corridors of the hospital, saying, "I want to show you two my favorite room."

"No," Sherlock said, grabbing John by his collar and yanking him out of the hallway, "I want to go in here."

'Here' was a small meeting room, one of probably dozens in this hospital, where people would go over shift notes and host M&M conferences and give presentations. Quite ordinary… except for the clear poly bags hanging from IV stands near every chair.

"Having another meeting?" Sherlock asked Smith, archly.

"Just a monthly top-up."

"So what's…" John tipped up the nearest bag to read the label, "TD-12? I've never heard of it."

"You wouldn't have," Sherlock replied, "It was never brought to market. Too many unacceptable adverse effects in Phase II human trials… seizures, nonmalignant fatty liver tumors… and one death. Originally intended to produce sedation and short-term amnesia for mild surgical procedures, nowadays it's Mr. Smith's drug of choice for those extra-special meetings I was telling you about."

"Oh, you know," Smith said, "In the… you know, the cut and thrust… of the business world, it's handy, sometimes. I only like to hire very principled people, and with this, it's almost like letting them have a detachable conscience!"

He chuckled. Even the laugh sounded greasy.

"Wonder what that's like," Mary said sarcastically. John ignored her and looked over at Sherlock, who was giving him a significant (though stoned) look back. Smith… actually was legitimately administering pharmaceutical amnestics to his colleagues, just like Sherlock had said, and all of a sudden John started believing he was in the company of the most significant undetected serial murderer in England.

"And people go along with this?" John asked, slowly.

"Oh, yeah," Smith said, "The great thing you lads have to realize is that all most people really want… is to say yes. Once you figure that bit out the rest's easy. Shall we get on?"

"Oh, yes, we've only got about twenty minutes left."

"Sorry?" Smith asked, wrinkling his forehead.

Sherlock just looked smugly down his nose at the older man, who led them back out into the hallway.

"You know who my favorite serial killer is?" Smith said after a moment.

"Besides yourself?" Sherlock drawled.

"Man called Doctor H.H. Holmes. Relative of yours?"

"Somewhere between twenty-seven and two hundred victims, bigamist, con artist, active in Chicago in the eighteen-nineties," Sherlock said, for John's benefit, "And his real last name was 'Mudgett' so I consider it to be unlikely."

"Probably for the best. He was an idiot."

The three men rounded the corner and passed through the double doors marked with "Morgue" in the tasteful minimalist font all hospitals use to identify the place. A pathologist and two technicians, in full procedure garb, looked up from where they were conducting an autopsy. Smith jerked a thumb over his shoulder and said, "Right, you lot, clear out."

The pathologist, a small man with dark hair and a mustache, cleared his throat, and said, "Mr. Smith, we're actually currently working on-"

"Carver, innit?"

"Yes, sir."

"How long have you been working here now?"

"Um…" the pathologist said hesitantly, "Almost seven years now."

"Seven years. Well, that's a long time, isn't it? Seven years."

The pathologist looked leerily at Smith over his surgical mask, and then stammered, "Um, right, everybody, take five-"

"Ten," Smith said, "And knock before you come in."

There was no other word for it, the employees scurried. Smith chuckled to himself and ambled over to the hastily covered-over corpse.

"The world's just full of people who want to say _yes_ ," Smith said, tugging the sheet down to reveal an emaciated and bald young man with an open y-incision gaping on his chest.

"They… just let you do that?" John asked. Squeaked, if he wanted to be honest.

"It's basically my hospital. Not officially, of course, belongs to the people… but you donate that much money and you get to be right down at the heart of it. Got keys and everything."

"So, your favourite room: the mortuary," Sherlock said, opening the refrigerated drawers for brief inspections just as he always did in every morgue, "Bit cliche, isn't it?"

"Oh, I don't know," Smith said. He ran his palm over the hairless scalp of the corpse, and John unwittingly raised a hand to stop him… but he'd already moved on.

"H. H. Holmes loved the dead. He mass-produced 'em. Built something they called a 'murder castle,' just to kill people. Incinerators, acid baths, gallows, gas chambers… really everything you could imagine."

"As the sensationalist media of the time did imagine, technically. Very little of that is actually true."

Smith ignored this snarky little interruption and grinned at Sherlock.

"Whatever. It was stupid. He was a bloody doctor, after all. All that effort. You want to hide a stick, you go find a forest, you don't plant a new one. And if you wanna hide a murder, or wanna hide lots and lots of murders, just find a ... hospital."

Holy… John cleared his throat, and asked, "Can we be clear? Are you confessing?"

"To what?"

"The way you're talking…"

Smith chuckled, "Oh, sorry. You mean, am I a serial killer, or am I just trying to mess with your funny little head? Well, it's true, I do like to mess with people … and yes, I am a bit creepy, it sells newspapers… but am I what he says I am? Is that what you're asking?"

John shrugged, and said, "Yes?"

Smith shook his head.

"Good Lord," he said, "You know, I read some of that blog of yours this morning, and you really did come off a bit thick, but I thought it was just… storytelling. Make this one look cleverer by comparison."

All the jovial greasy humor was off Smith now, and he continued, "I mean, come on. Look at him. There are two possible explanations for what's going on here. One, I'm a serial killer… who hasn't been caught despite despite being in the news _every day_ for the last twenty years _and_ confessing it on the regular to the people I work with… or Sherlock Holmes, just maybe, is off his tits on drugs. Getting obsessed with a public personality 'cause he's _mental?_ He might as well be doing it to impress Jodie Foster."

Sherlock raised a hand to his ear theatrically, and said, "Ah, there she comes. She must have hurried. Here, you can have this back."

He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and handed Smith a mobile phone. Smith looked down at it and said, "Oi. This is _my_ phone!"

"Yes. I borrowed it to send a text. Sorry not sorry. It said, 'I can stand it no longer, I've confessed... to my crimes. Please forgive me!' So now she's come down to see what's going on."

"Who?"

"Faith. Your daughter. It'll be nice to see her again, I rather liked her."

"You don't know Faith," Smith rumbled menacingly, "You simply do not."

Sherlock shrugged.

"I know you care about her deeply. I know you invited her to one of your special board meetings. You care what she thinks. And she came to Baker Street. She came to see me because she was scared of her Daddy."

Smith snorted derisively.

" _Never_ happened. This is what I was on about, Doctor Watson. The drugs unhinged 'im."

Sherlock grinned widely. "Well, let's see, shall we? Faith, stop loitering at the door and come in! This is your father's favorite room. Come and meet his best friends."

A pretty blonde woman popped her head around the door at that, then came into the room. She walked with a stick, and wore a knee-length green dress and big spectacles, and asked in a worried tone, "Dad? What's happening? What was that text about? I don't _like_ that sort of joke, you know that."

"It's nothing, love, I'm sorry you were troubled, it's-" Smith began, but Sherlock interrupted him with a, "And who in God's name are _you_?"

John looked at Sherlock, who was staring at Faith Smith, aghast, and his heart fell. Sherlock couldn't have, surely…

"What, you don't recognize my _Faith_? Love, this is Sherlock Holmes."

The woman's… Faith's face lit up, and she walked towards Sherlock, her free hand outstretched for a handshake, "Oh my God, I love your blog."

Sherlock's horrified expression matched the way John felt exactly, and he stammered, "You're not her. You're not the woman who came to Baker Street."

Smith started laughing, a plummy contented sound, as Faith said confusedly, "Well, no. Never been there."

"So who came to my flat? You… look different." Sherlock was shaking his head in confused, druggy denial, running his hands through his hair.

"Sherlock-" John began, not knowing where the sentence was going to end up.

"Yeah, I mean, I never was there," Faith said, glancing uncertainly between her father and Sherlock, "I don't even really know quite where Baker Street is, actually. Never looked it up on a map."

Smith was actually cackling now, bending over and resting his hands on his thighs in glee. Sherlock staggered back, raising a hand to his mouth, and John took a step towards him, saying, "Sherlock-"

The detective pointed a hand at Smith, and shouted, "Watch him! He's got a knife."

"Stop it, Sherlock," John snapped, hoping the 'Captain Watson' voice would snap him out of it.

"He took a scalpel off the table," Sherlock said hysterically, "John, I saw him, _please_ , it's behind his back."

Smith, still laughing, raised both his empty hands in the air.

"I _saw_ you take it, damn you," Sherlock hissed… and then right there, in his hand, was a scalpel. John's focus narrowed on that small blade, only faintly noticing that Smith had stopped laughing and that Faith had screamed.

"Sherlock, put that down. Now," John ordered.

Sherlock didn't. He staggered forwards, blade out, and Smith pulled back. Without even thinking about it, John got an arm over Sherlock's and struck sharply at his hand, making him drop the scalpel.

He didn't quite know how it happened after that. But he had two fists full of the lapels of Sherlock's coat, and he was pushing the taller man backwards into the drawers inset in the walls of the morgue. And then...

In what happened afterwards, Mary didn't say a word to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in getting this chapter out. I'm not blocked or anything, I am just a crawlingly slow writer and needed to get my Sherlolly fic exchange entry completed on deadline. It's done now, and my 200 words a day prowess can get focused back on this one. Huge quantities of the dialogue in this chapter was directly taken from "The Lying Detective."


	7. Confession

The interrogation rooms at New Scotland Yard seemed a lot smaller when you were locked  _in_  them than when you were watching from the other side of the two-way mirrors. Greg Lestrade let himself into the one where John had been put, sat opposite from him at the bare wooden table, and fixed him with a level gaze.

"You're not under arrest," he said, eventually, "I'm not reading you your rights or turning on the recorder. None of this is on the record. I just want to find out what the hell happened."

John took a deep breath. Simple, straightforward story. That was what was needed here.

"Sherlock thought that Culverton Smith is a serial killer. He… he imagined that Smith's daughter, Faith, had told him so. So we went to meet him at the hospital-"

"Yeah, why  _would_  you call the police for something like that?" Lestrade interjected dryly.

"But it turned out that it was all in his mind. Sherlock was… he's really messed up. And he pulled a knife, well, not a knife, really just a number 22 scalpel."

He gestured with his thumb and forefinger to show the size of the blade, "Just about that long. But he looked like he was trying to stab Smith with it so I knocked it out of his hand. And then-"

John looked down at his hands. The skin over the knuckle of his middle finger was split. You couldn't punch a man in the face barehanded and not do  _some_  damage to yourself as well.

"Then I hit him. I  _really_ hit him."

"Yeah, you did," Lestrade agreed, "Put the boot in too, if I'm any judge. Blacked his eye at least, and he's got a couple cracked ribs that I'm pretty sure he didn't start the day with."

In his bleak, exhausted,  _disappointed_  fury it hadn't occurred to John that it was too easy, that even when high as a kite Sherlock should have been a much more even match for him. There had been a red mist over his eyes that only cleared when he realized that Smith was now trying to restrain  _him_ , and Sherlock was on the ground saying, "No, let him. I'm the reason his wife got shot."

"I don't have any reason," John said, "No motive. I was... angry with him, about Mary. But I know that doesn't make it right."

"You did it," Lestrade replied, in the weary tones of a man who has sat in the same chair and heard the same confessions on a daily basis throughout a lengthy career, "Because you've been wanting to do it for years. Since he came back from the dead. Maybe even before then, I dunno."

John stared at his battered fists. Greg scratched his head, stretched his legs out, and sighed, "Sherlock doesn't want us to charge you. And Culverton Smith's basically calling you a hero on television so we'd have a time of proving it wasn't justifiable if he did. It's up to CPS, obviously, but you're probably going to get away with it."

"Where is Sherlock now?" John asked.

"Why do you want to know?"

"Greg…"

Lestrade shrugged.

"Still at Caedwalla's. They admitted him. That's not  _all_  on you, mind, he did a lot of it to himself. They'll look after him. Smith said they'll put him in his favorite room."

Something about that phrase set off faint alarm bells in John, but Greg just went on, "I don't know how it got this bad this quickly. Not you, obviously,  _you_  haven't surprised me today. But Sherlock. Did y _ou_  know what he was up to?"

"No, of course not."

"I wonder if we just could have seen it coming."

"We  _did_  see it coming. Hell, Sally Donovan warned me about him the first time I met her. Last Christmas he shot Charles Magnussen in the face. We always saw it coming."

John laughed a bit at his own folly.

"But it was  _fun_."

Greg was staring at him, agape. John frowned, and Greg finally asked him, "He bloody did  _what_?"

John mentally replayed his last words and raised a hand to his mouth in horror.

"Jesus, Greg, I shouldn't... You  _cannot_  tell that to anyone-"

"For fuck's sake, I am an officer of the bloody  _law_ , John. You can't just drop something like that into the conversation and expect me to just blow right on by it."

"It was meant to be a secret, they D-noticed it, he did it for... I, I, I-"

He was stammering under Greg's clear-eyed gaze. The older man sighed.

"You look like shit."

"I'm… I'm not sleeping well," John said helplessly.

"Yeah, well, I can understand that. It's been a rough couple of months for you. So piss off. Go get some rest. And then shape up, all right?"

Lestrade hammered on the door of the interrogation room until a uniformed constable arrived to let them out. John left the Met's headquarters, shrugging into his jacket as he went. It was already dark out, he'd not gone back to work after his lunchtime therapist's appointment, Mike and Gabby had been looking after Rosie for fourteen hours at a stretch… and then his phone rang.

John fished it out of his pocket and saw it was from a blocked number. With absolutely no sense of surprise he answered the call with a, "Hello, Mycroft."

"There's a car waiting for you. Get in," Mycroft instructed in his dry upper-class clip of a voice.

Sure enough, as John passed the revolving sign and got to the street he saw the inevitable big black towncar with the inevitable LX number plate and the inevitable beautiful brunette woman holding the door open for him.

He considered for a moment. And then he said, "No."

" _No?_ " Mycroft replied, in tones of such outraged dignity that John almost wanted to smile.

"No. I need to see my wife before visiting hours end. You may have me kneecapped  _tomorrow_."

With that he rang off, walked straight past the car, and got on the next bus that would take him across the river to Lambeth.

When he got to the critical care ward, Mary's name had been erased from the whiteboard listing the current patients and their diagnoses. John stared numbly at it, but only for a few moments before the charge nurse noticed him looking and exclaimed, "Oh, God, no, Doctor Watson, she's  _fine_! We moved her over to step-down care this afternoon."

She gave him directions to the other ward and told him to hurry if he wanted to make it in time for visiting hours. John hurried. He got checked in (not without meaningful glances-at-watch and instructions that he'd have to keep it brief), turned over his coat and his mobile, cleaned his hands with antibacterial foam, and went to find his wife.

She was sleeping, curled up on her good side. This ward was pleasanter than the ICU, with purple sheets and blankets, less noise and bustle, and the lights were actually dimmed in acknowledgement of the nighttime outside. Silently, John pulled up a chair and sat next to Mary's bed.

Even in sleep, pain was marked on her face. But her breathing was steady and regular, and John saw that they'd given her an NG tube, so she probably didn't feel hungry anymore. He leaned his forehead onto the mattress near Mary's pillow and closed his eyes.

If he could just get some bloody  _rest_ , things would have to seem better, right?

Just then he felt a gentle stroking on the top of his head. It was Mary, lifting up a hand to card her fingers through his hair. John raised his head enough to see her open eyes and soft smile.

"Sorry," he murmured, "I didn't mean to wake you up."

"S'okay," Mary replied, "I wasn't-"

She interrupted herself with a jaw-cracking yawn that gave the lie to her next words.

"I wasn't sleeping. Frankly the drugs down here are a bit shit in comparison to the ones upstairs. I may have to write a strongly-worded letter of complaint to the Joint Commision."

John laughed a little at that, because despite still being mumbly and slurry there was something of Mary's old sharpness to her remarks, and the little silver thread of  _hope_ started to shine again.

"I'll help you with that. There  _are_ some upsides, though."

"I know. Can you bring Rosie tomorrow?"

"She's getting over a bit of a cold right now, but the second she's better, yes. We can't have you getting sick."

"Good," she smiled, "I can't wait."

And John found he couldn't either, that seeing his little family back together was now the deepest desire of his heart.

"Where were you this afternoon?" Mary asked him then, "I waited but you didn't turn up."

"I know, I'm sorry. I had to go out with Sherlock."

Mary smiled fondly at the mention of Sherlock's name.

"Oh, that's nice. How is he?"

John hesitated, not knowing quite how to explain it to her.

"Not… not so good, actually. He's using again. And he got this sort of fixation on Culverton Smith, thinks he's a serial killer."

Mary wrinkled her nose.

"Him from telly?"

"Yeah."

"Is he?"

John sighed, and said, "No. He's  _really_  creepy, but not a serial killer. I don't know where Sherlock got the idea from, but he's… stuck on it, somehow."

Mary hadn't moved her head, but she'd stopped looking at John and was focusing on some sort of mental picture about halfway between them. Slowly, she said, "Ohhh… oh dear."

"What?"

"This might be my fault."

John smiled at her, not understanding.

"How could it be  _your_  fault?"

"I… I sent him a message-" she began, hesitantly, as if she were thinking through it.

"When?"

"It was… when I left. To draw out Ajay. I sent a message to him. Not Ajay, Sherlock. About you, and what to do if… if I died."

John cocked his head and listened as Mary went on, sounding more sure of herself as she went.

"I told him that you'd need him to help you, and that the way to do that, was to make you help  _him_. By having you come to his rescue, if he were in danger."

John folded his lips together. There was always someone scheming behind-the-scenes about him, and he supposed it was nice to hear about it firsthand for once, but he really wished that all of them would just  _stop it_.

"I knew that you'd be able to help him, even if you weren't able to help yourself. He needed to find a bad guy that would be a threat to him. A Moriarty or a Magnussen or… somebody. And then you'd save him. And that would save you. Because-"

Mary chuckled sleepily.

"Because you were  _definitely_  going to miss me."

He didn't like to think of that… how close it had been. If there had been just a small difference in the trajectory of a bullet, the EMTs arriving a bit later in heavy London traffic, a different surgeon on duty. Any of those things not working out  _exactly right_ , and John would not be here. He'd be preparing for his first Christmas as a widower, raising a child on his own. And Mary would be  _ashes_.

And so John pushed resentment down, and smiled, brushed his thumb over her cheek.

"Well, Sherlock's not in danger just now. Except from himself. So I won't be needing to save him."

Mary smiled, an expression of surpassing sweetness, and said, "Yes, but you would, if you could. That's what you do. You're the  _hero_."

Oh, that was a  _bitter_ lie, wasn't it? And this time she didn't even know she was lying. Behind him, Mary's nurse cleared her throat and said, "Visiting hours are over, sir. If you'd care to take your leave?"

John took hold of Mary's hand, and kissed her knuckles.

"I'll be back. And I love you."

"Mmm… I love you too. But I do think you two should look more closely at that Culverton Smith. I mean, I know I told him to find a bad guy so maybe he went looking in the wrong place… but Sherlock doesn't normally make that kind of mistake. He might be a bad hat after all."

"Okay," John smiled down at her.

Then he left. It was snowing, and he turned his collar up as he made his way towards Waterloo station so he could get back to Twickenham and Rosie.

For just a moment, his mind was at peace. And that moment was probably what saved Sherlock's life, because in that moment of quiet John remembered the phrase "favorite room" that Greg had used, and where he had heard that before, and his heart stuttered a few beats.

With sudden, terrified certainty, he dialed Lestrade's number and frantically tried to wave down a cab.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter the "I really hit him" and the discussion between John and Lestrade about whether they should have seen it coming are mostly borrowed.


	8. Christmas

Rosie Watson was displeased with the level of service she was receiving.

Daddy (she couldn't yet make the word herself, but she knew that  _those_  sounds meant the one who made the funny faces and played the noisy game and spent all night sitting next to Rosie's sleeping place so that she would be safe) had picked her up. She had spent the day, as she had on alternate days for the last few decades, at Mike- and- Gabby- and- that- little- bastard- Emmett- who- bit- Rosie's house.  _That_  had been fine. But after he picked her up everything went awry.

He gave Rosie a bath, which was  _wrong_  because bathtime  _belonged_  just before sleeptime, and he did not sing the hair washing song or let her splash after the unpleasant bits were done. Then instead of dressing her in one of her comfortable soft outfits he put her in an itchy red dress, white tubes on her legs, and hard shoes on her feet. Worst of all, Daddy put an unconscionable elasticated  _thing_  around Rosie's head.

They went for a ride in the car, and then Nanny climbed into the front seat and said to Rosie, "Oh, love, aren't you precious in your pretty Christmas dress?"

Then she angled her head, sniffed, and said delicately, "Ah, John, I  _believe_  we may have a diaper situation."

There was an investigation, and Daddy mumbled, "Jesus. So that's what happens when you eat avocados, hm?"

Avocados were  _excellent_ , Rosie said.

The second clothes of the evening, put on in an awkward tag-team in the back seat of the car, were less itchy than the first ones, although the unconscionable elasticated  _thing_  stayed around Rosie's head. Rosie and Daddy and Nanny drove to a new place, which Rosie did not care for  _at all_. It was loud and smelled bad and there were all kinds of strangers around.

There was a conversation about fifty feet above Rosie's head, and then Daddy showed her a handful of something that looked like his (amazing but mostly forbidden) shaving foam. Rosie took a tentative pat and thought that it was okay, but then he slathered it all over her hands and arms and wouldn't let her taste them afterwards to see if it was good to eat.

It was an awful afternoon, really.

They left Nanny chatting with a stranger and Daddy carried Rosie through doors into a big room, where Rosie saw a face that she hadn't seen in at  _least_ a thousand years, and she  _shouted_  for joy,  _I thought you went away forever and ever!_

"Whoa, little wriggler," Daddy exclaimed, getting a firmer grip around Rosie's middle, "No shrieking in the hospital."

They walked up to the bed where Mama was smiling at Rosie and stretching her arms out, decorated with strange tubes.

"Father Christmas came a few days early this year," Daddy said, "But the only present I was allowed to bring past infection control was this one."

"This is the only present I need,"  _she_ said, smiling so widely it made Rosie laugh, "Now give me my baby, John Watson."

There was something wrong with Mama, Rosie could tell. She was as soft and warm as always, but her smell was off. Like  _medicine_  instead of her pretty spray and the good kind of milk. Rosie reached up to pat Mama's face but Daddy took hold of her hand and said, "No, no, be gentle."

"I'm  _fine_ ," Mama said, staring straight into Rosie's eyes.

"Until she yanks out your cannula, yes."

Daddy was being dim, the way he was sometimes.  _Gentle_ was what you had to be so that Kitty wouldn't make the bad noise and go climb up on top of the fridge. Whereas Mama, back in the long-long-ago, had been the  _entire universe_. How could you be gentle with the universe? Why would you ever need to? Admittedly things were pretty good now, Rosie said, with Daddy and Nanny and Kitty and avocados, but it was hard not to be sad about the time when it was just the two of them, and Mama's heartbeat had surrounded her always.

"Oh, I missed you too, my darling," Mama said, nuzzling into Rosie's hair, "And what in the name of arse is that on your head?"

"Mrs. H. got her a really cute outfit for Christmas and that was the topper," Daddy said, "Then there was an incident. Apparently she  _can_  eat an entire avocado by herself but it's not a good idea to let her."

"Well, we'll just say the horrid thing fell off, won't we?" Mama said, pulling off the unconscionable elasticated  _thing_. Rosie snuggled in. There was an understanding between the two of them that nobody else was quite able to manage.

"She's talking so much now. And she's so  _big_ ," Mama said, thick-voiced.

"Still not much in the way of distinguishable words," Daddy agreed, sitting down at the bedside, "But you'll have to see her eat. She really started getting into it when you were... off."

"Oh, God." Mama felt sad, and Rosie didn't understand why. Everything was okay again, now.

They sat in silence, Rosie resting her head on Mama's chest. Eventually Mama coughed and said, "They were talking about you boys on the BBC this morning. Sherlock was actually right, huh?"

"Yeah, he actually was. We got a confession."

"Did he come with you?" Mama asked hopefully.

"No, Mrs. Hudson did," Daddy said, "Sherlock's… he's in hospital too."

"Oh, no. What did he take?"

"A shedload," Daddy said, running a hand through his hair, "Molly showed me the list, and I have to say it was really impressive this time. But... that's not all of it."

He hesitated. Mama asked, "John, what's wrong? What happened?"

"We fought. By which I mean, I hit him, and he let me. He's really pretty beat up."

There was another silence. Then Mama asked, "That's an interesting use of the passive voice. Why would you do that?"

Daddy made a puffing noise.

"I mean… you're lying there in a hospital bed and asking me that? He got you  _shot_ , Mary."

"Well…  _no._  He could have handled that situation better, obviously. But  _I_  got me shot. Darling, that doesn't go in your mouth," Mama said, taking the elasticated  _thing_  from Rosie and handing it over to Daddy. Daddy took it from her and gave Rosie the nice round ring that made her teeth feel better instead.

"I may someday encounter a man who can make me do something against my will, but you  _did_ meet the last one who tried and you saw what happened then. Certainly Sherlock Holmes is never going to manage it.  _I_ jumped. He didn't make me."

Daddy was making his hands into fists, and when he answered back, Rosie didn't like how his voice sounded. It was low and quiet but it didn't sound like  _Daddy_.

"So what, then, Mary?" he said, "You just… you were just going to die? You were going to, to, to bloody leave me? And  _Rosie_? That's what you wanted?"

Mama said quietly, "John, keep your temper. You're scaring her."

She sighed.

"Of  _course_  I don't want to die, or leave you two. I would have  _hated_  to… everything was going so well. And there was an element of just reacting and not thinking about it. I honestly don't know if I could have done it in cold blood."

Mama laughed a little, and put her hands over Rosie's ears, which was silly because Rosie could still hear quite clearly, "I do remember that. I hit the ground and thought, 'Oh, shit.'"

She took her hands off Rosie's ears and gently kissed her hair, let Rosie grip her index fingers in her fists.

"But John… Ajay was willing to shoot you in the head, just to get to me, and until a month before then I had thought that he was my friend. And  _dead_. I had no idea Vivian Norbury ever even existed until I met her at the aquarium, and she was my enemy too."

Mama ran her finger down the bridge of Rosie's nose, and Rosie giggled.

"If the ones I don't know about can do things like this, what would the ones I  _do_  know about do, if they found me? Or you two? Your old CO had it right. There's a proper time to die… and if you can pick a time when you can save your friend, keep the people you love safe? Then you should embrace it. Oh,  _God_ , hold her."

And Daddy did support Rosie with a hand on her back when Mama's voice got urgent, although she didn't know why, she was perfectly capable of sitting up by herself without help, had been for years. Because Mama had turned to the side and started coughing, a deep and rasping hack that shook the whole bed.

A stranger hurried to the bed and raised part of it up, gave Mama a drink of water. Then she frowned at Daddy and said, "That's been your five minutes."

"Only a bit longer, please? I just talked too much, that's all," Mama said with a wide, false smile.

The stranger frowned.

"Your heart rate and your bp are up and your O2 saturation is  _down_ , Mrs. Watson. And it  _is_  flu season so we're stretching a point already letting you have a visitor this young."

"Couldn't you just stretch another point and let us have a  _few_  more minutes. It would be  _so_  kind of you. Cross my heart we'll be good," Daddy said, and the way  _he_ smiled made the stranger blink her eyes rapidly and say, "Well… one minute _._ "

Then she went away.

"Fairly suave, Captain Watson," Mama commented.

"It's a gift."

Mama sighed raggedly, and said, "Sometimes living ends up being harder than the alternative. But that doesn't mean it's not  _so_  much better. If you're angry with me about it, be angry with  _me_. Not Sherlock."

"I don't  _want_ to be angry with you, Mary," Daddy said quietly.

"I know you don't but sometimes I think that that's really the-"

But Mama stopped talking because the stranger had come back and said, "That's enough time for today, I think."

"I'll… I'll go pop her out with Mrs. Hudson, and then I'll come back in, and we'll finish talking," Daddy said, clearing his throat.

Mama raised her eyebrows and replied, "No you will not. You'll send Martha in to visit me and stay out in the waiting area with Rosie, because she's going to start crying her head off in a minute and she's going to need her Dad."

Taking Rosie back into her arms, Mama said, "But she'll come back here tomorrow, and every day until Mummy can come home for her. And that won't be long now, my darling, I promise."

Rosie made a discontented sound, because Mama was holding tighter than she liked. And then Mama let her go, and Daddy picked Rosie back up and stood.

"You can fix this, John," Mama said, "And you'll have to, for now, until I can help you."

"I can try," Daddy replied.

"I love you. Both, so much."

"We love you too, don't we Rosie? Can you wave bye-bye?"

She could, but she didn't want to, because she didn't like what that meant. And as Daddy carried her out of the big room, Rosie started to scream.


	9. Contrition

Christmas was quiet that year. John didn't get a tree or decorate, and he bought Rosie a few small things but basically she ignored them in favor of the wrapping paper. They ate lunch at Baker Street where Mrs. Hudson (unsurprisingly) turned out to be of the push-the-boat-out then-light-it-on-fire school of baby gift-giving, _all_ of which Rosie ignored in favor of the wrapping paper.

Later that afternoon he drank cocoa off the tea trolley near Mary's bed, and Rosie laughed like a drain at the felt reindeer antlers her mother was wearing, and that was _good_.

Just before the new year, John hauled Rosie, the pack-and-play, baby monitor, and his entire stockpile of cleaning supplies and patience over to 221B. With the aid of Mrs. Hudson and a few gallons of bleach, he cleaned the place down to… well, not to the sort of level _he_ would like. But he currently couldn't even maintain that in his own home, so just down to something fit for human habitation, because the flat had been _trashed_. Mrs. Hudson sighed regretfully and said, "Hard to tell what was Sherlock and what was the _federales_." Which… whatever. John didn't ask.

Sherlock came home. John had floated the idea of him _actually_ going to _actual_ rehab, but had been shut down firmly by Sherlock and (surprisingly) Mycroft and Greg.

"Definition of insanity, right?" Greg said, "Doing the same thing over again and expecting different results?" So Sherlock's (quite decent-sized, when had that happened?) circle of friends set up a rota to look after him and keep him off the sweeties.

Sherlock, like most people coming off opiates, was depressed in the aftermath. His hands shook too badly to play his violin, he didn't feel up to taking any of the cases that filled his inbox, he just tended to stare quietly into space. Therefore John manipulatively took advantage of the fact that he was in possession of an adorable baby and started bringing Rosie along with him sometimes. He justified this with the true claim that it was easier for him to have all the people who needed minding be located in central London.

Sherlock had always affected a superior nonchalance about John's daughter but even he had to acknowledge that she was "an excellent listener." And she was: she'd stare up at Sherlock, enraptured at the sound of his voice, for ages. John awoke from his station on the couch once at the sound of her fussing (he was still insomniac enough that inconvenient detours into unconsciousness were a regular order of the day when he sat still for too long) to see Sherlock gliding the baby nimbly through the front room, explaining that, " _This_ is the Viennese waltz, Watson, notable for its faster pace and simple structure, both of which enable me to keep your attention and distract you from the _ennui_ that troubles you."

In short order, Sherlock had perked up enough that he started setting up little cushion mazes for Rosie to crawl through and rewarding her with biscuits when she improved on previous run times.

On an afternoon when Rosie was off at the Stamfords', for the first time in months, John opened up his blog. He thought "The Adventure of the Dying Detective," had a good ring to it, although Sherlock rolled his eyes as always at the titles. But he did still let John interview him and fill in the blanks that he hadn't learned already.

"The only thing that still really troubles me… is Faith Smith," Sherlock said, "Or my imagined version of her, as it turns out."

He sighed.

"A lot of what I do is what ordinary people do unconsciously, I suppose. They take in a lot of information without being aware of it and 'get a feeling' about something. I do it quite consciously and with massively improved observational skills and therefore I do not have feelings, I have _facts_.

"I can only conclude that, in my altered state, I became… ordinary. For a while. She seemed terribly real, and told me things that I didn't consciously know, but she was… simply a construction of my mind."

Sherlock gazed out the window at the rainshrouded street, and shrugged. John couldn't help but smile when he asked: "So you think that a typical feature of being 'ordinary' is inventing women who tell you things that you secretly already knew?"

Sherlock looked down his nose at John and said dryly, "Incidentally, how _is_ Mary doing?"

John frowned. There was absolutely no way Sherlock could have known about Imaginary Mary… who had, thankfully, vanished, once Real Mary was alert enough to talk to him again. Now the only side effects of the insomnia were the occasional moving shadows out of the corner of his eye and the vague sensation that he might have died without realizing it.

"Mary's doing well," he said, deciding not to give Sherlock the satisfaction if John was wrong about _that_ hypothetical deduction. "She's moved to the regular ward, starting physio… they're saying maybe two more weeks to a month before she's cleared to get home. It's been interesting seeing both of you through detox at the same time. One of you is a much better sport about it than the other."

Sherlock chuckled softly.

"Yes, well, Mary _has_ always been a rather difficult person."

"She'd like you to come visit her, you know. She's asked about it. I'm happy to take you along for visiting hours tonight if you're feeling up to it."

Sherlock shrank in on himself, and hesitated, and said, "Perhaps… in a while. When I'm not quite so obviously-"

He gestured vaguely at himself, indicating… the black eye and subconjunctival hemorrhage, probably. Or the palsy and pallor and shadowy skin courtesy of his limping-along kidneys.

John hesitated, then closed his laptop.

"You know, right, that I told her? Mary knows. About the drugs… and about what I did to you."

Sherlock blinked at him and began hesitantly, "John, I have never been angry or offended about _that_."

"Why not?"

Sherlock shrugged, and said simply, "It was justified."

"No, it wasn't, because what I was angry about wasn't _actually_ your fault. Mary was _very_ clear on that, and she's right. Vivian Norbury pulled the trigger. Mary jumped. You were just there at the time. So… I'm sorry. I was wrong, and I apologize."

"No. Mary _shouldn't have,_ " Sherlock spat, making a fist and slamming it against the arm of his chair, "She should _not_ have done that. I am _alone_ , not a parent, and a _drug addict._ One of us has a life of higher value than the other and we all know which one that is. So why did she do that?"

"I guess because she thought you're worth keeping alive," John said, "A world without Sherlock Holmes in it would be a worse one."

"It creates an unspeakable obligation, to owe your life to someone. I've got no way of repaying her for it."

John raised his eyebrows and said, "If I can make a suggestion? Maybe stay off the drugs from now on. If I need help in the future there's better ways to go about that. Just… be good. And then I think you two will be quits. She did shoot you that one time, after all."

Sherlock pressed his lips together.

"Everyone conspires against my having any fun. Fine. I'm getting a bit old for that sort of thing anyway."

He brushed invisible specks off the lapels of his dressing gown, and then asked crabbily, "Now we're friends again. Do we have to hug or something?"

John snorted, "We didn't even hug when you were flying off to your _death._ Not manly enough for us. But I bet Mary'd like a kiss on the cheek tonight."

"Tell her I'll be in next week. The bruising should be subtle enough by then for me to go out in public."

"Seriously?"

"Allow a man his pride."

John chuckled and opened up his laptop again. Sherlock picked up one of the cold-case files Lestrade had left for him and started paging through it. The only sound in the flat was the patter of the rain, the rattle of the ancient radiators, and then all of a sudden…

A woman's voice. Moaning in… what was _probably_ a faked orgasm, given where and when it had been recorded, but it was always damn convincing as far as John could tell.

Sherlock was glancing guiltily at John and bright red spots had appeared on his pallid cheeks.

Oh, this was _too_ good.

"So that was-" he began.

"It's quite possible for a text alert to be attached to any number of unrelated-" Sherlock blurted out.

"Oh bullshit, you've gotten at least two new phones since then, you old _dog_ ," John laughed, delighted at this turn of events, "Irene bloody Adler. Not dead. You _saved_ her and you never let out a _hint_."

"Like you're one to talk, 'got herself on a witness protection scheme,''' Sherlock snapped back.

"So… she just texts you at random?"

"Not… quite at random. On particular occasions," Sherlock replied carefully.

John frowned, and remembered Sherlock saying he was getting old, and grinned widely, "Okay, I'm going to make a deduction now."

"Oh, well this is _always_ entertaining-" Sherlock gibed.

"Happy birthday."

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

"Yes, fine, thank you."

"Never knew when your birthday was."

"Well now you do, and isn't it _delightful_?"

"So shall I step out and leave you two alone?"

John grinned at Sherlock, who looked blankly back at him, and replied, "I don't text her _back_. That's not how this works."

"Why not?"

"Well," Sherlock explained, as he would do to an idiot (so as he always did), "She is, ultimately, a lesbian. I am, ultimately, an arsehole incapable of forming or maintaining a romantic relationship. What about any of that sounds like a good idea?"

"Well, there's the bit where she's a beautiful, dangerous, _ridiculously_ sexy woman, who's obviously willing to make an exception to her normal preferences for you and would probably be game for a threesome with another woman. It's an opportunity most men would give their left nut to have and you're… just not going for it? It's insane. Why are you so determined to be alone?"

Sherlock cocked his head at John's last remark, looking confused. In time he said, carefully, "John, it's not a question of my determination or lack thereof. It's acknowledgement of reality."

This was clearly something Sherlock had thought about, because his speech was measured, but certain.

"You… are a good man, so I imagine that it's difficult for you to understand that while part of me would like to be one too the fact is that not all of us are c _apable_ of being that. For a woman. We… I… can't find someone and be a good man and make her happy. Irene, for all her numerous and _terrifying_ flaws, understands this about me."

Sherlock turned his mobile in his hands, and smiled softly.

"So she texts, and she doesn't expect replies. And that's what I can manage."

"When Mary was in the operating room _I_ texted a woman. To break off an affair we'd been having."

John hadn't planned to say that. But with Sherlock staring at him in shock, it seemed like he couldn't stop.

"Last summer, I met a beautiful woman on the bus. Her name's Elizabeth, and she's got red hair, and she liked my eyes, and she gave me her number, and I texted her. For _months_. Every chance I got. It wasn't… I mean it wasn't physical, we only ever met twice, but…

"You and, and, and _Mary_ and everyone think that somehow _I'm_ the good guy in this story," John laughed and shook his head, "And I'm a fucking fraud. The only reason that Culverton Smith didn't finish the job is that Mary thought that I would save you and I didn't want to prove her wrong. Because it's _not_ easy for me, Sherlock, to be a good man. _That's_ the point. They make you want to be _better_."

Sherlock closed his mouth, stood and stepped to the mantelpiece, resting his hand on the skull. The rain fell, and the radiators clanked, and finally he said, "You…"

When he turned back to face John his eyes were nearly incandescent with fury and he venomously hissed, "You _stupid_ motherfucker."

Sherlock, who thought that swearing was tasteless, said that. John was speechless, and sherlock began pacing the room, dressing gown fluttering behind him.

"Are you ever knowingly undercliched? Turn forty, move to the suburbs, have a kid, whoops, right on schedule here comes the bloody stupid midlife crisis. You want a red sports car next?"

That last hit too close to the bone for John's taste. Sherlock continued, his voice rising.

"You somehow managed to allure one of the most remarkable women I have ever met into tolerating your temper and addiction to danger and _personality_. After _months_ of whinging about it, you decided to accept the obvious fact that the only sort of woman you _could_ love is the sort who would happily spend fifteen years as one of the deadliest independent secret agents on earth. And then… what? You casually decide to throw away this relationship… a relationship, which just incidentally, I personally shot a man in the _face_ to enable you to continue… over some _bint_ on a _bus_?"

Sherlock was shouting, now, and John finally replied, "I didn't... mean it that way. I don't want to throw away-."

"Oh, of course you bloody don't, you _idiot_ ," Sherlock spat, "You just thought you could conceal it from your retired superagent wife and consulting detective best friend. It's a miracle you got away with it for as long as you did."

John's face was twisting in spite of himself, and he said, "I wasn't thinking at all."

" _Clearly_."

He flung himself back down into his chair and _glared_ , and under that pale blue gaze John's soul quailed.

"I don't know what to do, Sherlock," he said, quietly.

Sherlock rolled his eyes, ran a hand through his wild hair, and finally said, "I suppose that depends."

"On what?"

"On whether this was a one-time and _inexplicably_ moronic deviation in the career of an otherwise exceptional husband and father, or whether it's chapter one in a very old story which ends with Mary sitting in my client's chair and asking me a question to which she already knows, deep down, the answer is yes."

John sat silently, as Sherlock leaned forward, elbows on knees, and fixed John with his gaze. His voice was quieter now, low, but intense.

"That's the bread and butter work of the private detective, you know, adultery. I could do half a dozen cases a day if I were inclined to it."

"It was a one time thing," John said.

"Are you _certain_?" Sherlock insisted, "Because if not, John Watson, I swear to you that Mary will get to keep me in the divorce. Or I'll help her to evade prosecution for your murder. Lady's choice."

"I'm certain."

Sherlock laughed ruefully.

"I find it remarkable to be giving you advice on relationships. But my best suggestion is: lie."

John looked quizzically at Sherlock, who continued, "Lie, every day, for the rest of your life. Never let her know about it. Mary wants peace and safety and _you_ … and right now I suspect she actually needs those things. Give them to her."

"Is… is that the right thing to do?"

"Well, no, of course it isn't, if any sort of conventional morality is to be believed in. But sometimes doing the right thing isn't _kind_ ," Sherlock hesitated, looking down at his folded hands, "Men like you and me… we can do terrible harm to a gentle heart."

John frowned. "A gentle heart," love Mary as much as you like, was _not_ an accurate descriptor of her. And it frankly didn't sound much like Irene Adler either. So he had to ask, "Sherlock, _did_ something happen between you and Molly?"

"In the course of the eight years of our acquaintance a great many things have happened between me and Molly Hooper-" Sherlock began until John interrupted him with a, "No, seriously, Sherlock."

Sherlock's mouth twisted in a grimace.

"You may have noticed that I have been… self-indulgent, of late. And one of the ways which I indulged myself was…"

"Christ. So are you two…?"

"No. And we never will be," the statement fell into the room with the ring of finality, "All the things that make me unsuitable for Irene Adler apply a thousand-fold more to Molly Hooper. I _cannot_ be what she needs. Wants. Whichever."

"I mean," John began slowly, "Couldn't you maybe-"

"No."

"So… she's supposed to take the evening shift with you tonight. How does that work?"

"If the past week is anything to go by," Sherlock said, "She will be very civil, and very silent. Molly always helps me. Even when I have broken her."

"Christ," John said again.

"Indeed."

"We are… a pair of terrible fuck-ups, aren't we?"

"I bow down to you, o _emperor_ of fuck-up," Sherlock replied dryly.

"Right," John said, and he took his phone out of his pocket and sent a text, "Go put on some clothes."

Sherlock looked down at his ratty mismatched pajamas and luxuriant silk robe and said, "Why?"

"Because I've just asked Molly to pick up Rosie and meet the two of us for cake. We're going to celebrate your birthday and you're going to hold a cute baby and look beaten up and sad and be very nice to her. Holding a cute baby softens them up, it works every time, something about having the second X chromosome."

"Stop _shipping_ us," Sherlock said.

John smiled.

"You first."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter the "I don't text her back" and "knowingly undercliched" are from "The Lying Detective." The "Why are you so determined to be alone?" is from "The Abominable Bride."


	10. Tranquility

Stairs weren't a thing that would happen for a while, therefore John had rearranged his tiny ground floor office into a temporary bedroom. But he'd forgotten all about the flight of steps that led _into_ the flat, and that created a problem.

John had actually done it before, once, but now the stairs were icy and he was nervous about his game shoulder. Sherlock was the next obvious candidate but got edgy and pointed out that he was still dealing with some tremors and muscle weakness as he recovered from his drugs binge. They bickered about it for a few minutes until Greg finally shook his head and commented, "There's not an iota of sack between the two of you, is there? Will you allow _me_ , milady?"

Thus, carried across the threshold in the arms of a handsome Scotland Yard detective inspector, Mary Watson returned home.

They'd all planned a little party to celebrate her homecoming. It was sedate, obviously, given that Mary was a long way off from "normal," but it was lovely. Everybody was so quietly pleased to see her return, except for Rosie, who was noisily pleased, and spent the afternoon pitchpoling the chairs over and repeating her new words, "Kitty!" and "bibbid" (which last meant really any kind of food, and there was still no sign that she planned to ever say "Mama" or "Dada," the ungrateful little punk.)

Sherlock and Molly seemed to be tense around one another, and Mary made a mental note to figure out what was going on there. But for now, she sat on the couch, drank the half-glass of champagne which was all that Doctor Nannypants McHusband thought she should have, and after an hour was exhausted and in need of her pain meds. The rest of the small crowd excused themselves, and the Watsons settled in for the evening.

The discharge instructions had suggested sleeping in a bed by yourself, ideally in a room by yourself (for health or morals, Mary wasn't quite clear) but that really didn't appeal to any of them, so they all crowded into the redecorated downstairs office. On that over-soft Ikea mattress, with John snoring at her side, Rosie making tired little "bub-bub" noises on his chest, and the cat purring around her feet, Mary slept deeply and serenely, at perfect peace. She didn't even awaken until John bought her a cup of tea and a fistful of pills in the morning.

In fact, she considered, watching her handsome husband spoon nutritional breakfast pap into her beautiful baby, there were times when being Mary Watson was really an absolutely wonderful life.

John left to drop Rosie at the childminder, trailing behind him a cloud of warnings on how she was not to do _anything_ without consulting him via phone first. For the first time since she'd been shot, Mary was actually… alone.

It was glorious.

She debated for awhile on what she might do that morning. She could see if there was a bottle of dye in the bathroom and take care of Mary Watson's inch-long dark roots. Or she could make a stab at folding Mary Watson's mountain of clean laundry: John had done his best and had at least been able to keep the clothes washed and dried, but getting them back into place had overwhelmed his capacities. Rosie had looked _very_ pick-and-mix that morning, and Mary was pretty sure that John himself was wearing odd socks.

But then she spotted a small pile of brightly wrapped packages sitting forgotten in the corner and decided that before anything else, she was going to open Mary Watson's much-belated Christmas prezzies.

John had got her a lovely though unimaginative necklace and, allegedly from Rosie, the matching bracelet. Sherlock, who was always weirdly good at gift giving, had sent a scarf that was the most beautiful thing Mary had ever seen, and which based on the orange _Hermes_ box was far more expensive than she'd ever buy for herself.

Molly'd got her porn. This was an ongoing thing they'd been doing at all gift exchanging occasions since Mary's hen night two years previously, though back then they had arguably been "romance novels." This was no longer the case, and Molly was clearly escalating based on the nearly-nude threesome and… live chicken?... on the cover of this offering. She would not win, though. Mary had discovered non-con raptor erotica, and Molly's birthday was coming up.

At the bottom of the pile, there was a small package wrapped in plain glossy blue paper with no tag on. Mary opened it up, and frowned when she saw the clearly used mobile phone inside. The note tucked in with it was written in elegant script on heavy cardstock, and said simply:

_Passcode is 1805. Look at the texts._

_-E_

Curious (and with all those troublesome old instincts pinging that she should be _alarmed_ ) Mary pressed her finger onto the button, but the battery was flat. Wincing at the motion, Mary stood and went to look for an iPhone charger cord.

Because it was odd. 1805 was _her_ passcode. It was their wedding anniversary.

* * *

On his lunch break John came back, carrier bags in hand, and called out, "Oi, Mary? I'm home. I got you some _saag paneer_ from that place you like."

"In here," he heard her quiet voice coming from the spare room. John went in, and saw her sitting on the unmade bed, a mobile in her hand.

"What's this?" she asked him.

Somehow part of him knew _exactly_ what it was, but he still had to say, "A phone?"

"Yes, a phone. With a _ton_ of text messages on it that look to be between you and another woman."

Whatever Mary saw in his face made _her_ face crumple, and she whispered, "Ohh… oh God, I didn't want it to be _true_."

He'd dreamed about her angry with him for weeks. Hurt was infinitely worse.

"Mary-" he began.

"Who the hell is _E_?" she asked him.

"She's nobody. She's-" John tried to think of a way to justify himself, "It's not as bad as it looks. And I broke it off with her."

Mary laughed cynically.

"Yeah, I saw that. You broke it off _twice_ , in fact… because you're 'not free.' Is that what this is to you?" she said, gesturing wildly around at nothing particular, but probably meaning the house in the suburbs, the marriage, the _wife,_ "Is this just _prison_ for you?"

She was white-faced and breathing rapidly, and said between gasps, "I try _so hard_ to be what you want and it's never going to be enough, is it?"

John reached out for her shoulder and Mary _slapped_ his hand away with a bitter, "Don't you _fucking_ touch me."

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry, I won't," he said, raising his hands, "But Mary, you need to think of your heart, and your blood pressure, and try to calm down."

Mary glared at him, unshed tears standing in her eyes, but she acknowledged the truth of what he was saying and started taking slow, controlled breaths, staring down at the floor.

"I can't even leave," she said eventually, hollowly, "Because we've got a child together and I can barely walk."

John's heart stopped.

"Is that... is that what you want?" he asked.

She didn't answer this, just kept on with her breathing and staring at the floor. When finally Mary raised her head, the emotion was scrubbed from her face. She looked at him with a dry, clear, assessing gaze and John remembered the last time he'd seen her look that way.

She'd been sitting in the client's chair at Baker Street, and Sherlock had confronted her with her past, and John had called her an assassin. And when he'd done that the look of horror that had been on her face in the empty houses was replaced by this serene blank stoicism.

He was looking at Rosamund, now, not Mary. And he'd not gotten to know Rosamund at all.

"I physically _cannot_ deal with this right now," she told him, quietly. "I'm not well enough. Thank you for the food. I'm not that hungry, so just put it in the refrigerator and I'll have it later."

"Mary-" John said. She set the mobile on the nightstand, laid on the bed, got beneath the covers and turned her face to the wall.

"Please close the door on your way out."

* * *

"And now that you have… gotten it off your chest, as it were, and Mary is home and safe, and you are reconciled with your friend, are you finding that you are resting better?"

"Um, yeah, actually," John said, "I mean, still not _well_ … Rosie's doing one of those sleep regression things at the moment and when she does that _everybody_ gets a share... but better. And Mary's able to pick her up now, so she's been doing some of the night call, and that's helped a lot."

Doctor Braun smiled sympathetically, bright blue eyes shining at him over the tops of her spectacles, and asked, "And how _is_ Mary?"

"Good. Great. Getting stronger every day. I think she might actually be unkillable."

"And how are _you_ and Mary?"

John inhaled, smiled wryly, and said, "We're… civil. And silent. Except for occasional interludes where we aren't either of those. She's… I guess that before she was holding back a lot of her thoughts and opinions about me. But we look after Rosie together, and that's basically all. I sleep- alone, in my room, and she sleeps in hers. Which oddly enough is like being newlyweds again, we did it for six months back then."

He laughed, although it really wasn't funny at all, "And I'm pretty sure that once she's feeling up to it she's going to leave me. She hasn't said it yet, but- she thought I was better than I am, and now she doesn't. Things changed for her."

"You might be surprised," Doctor Braun said with a shrug, "I imagine that's her inclination, but Mary is a person whose actions are almost exclusively controlled by _instinct_. Not surprising in a spy, of course, where rapid correct decision making is critical, but being forced by illness to sit still and think may well make her talk herself out of it."

John sat perfectly still, mind racing, and finally said, "I… I didn't tell you that. About her past."

"Didn't you?" Braun asked idly, looking vaguely out the window.

He'd spilled a secret to Lestrade when the insomnia had been at its worst, he knew, but he wouldn't have… to a stranger, surely?

"No, I didn't," he said, with more confidence than he felt.

"Oh, no, that's right, you didn't," she said, " _I went out._ I wanted to see the people he plays with, and _she_ turned out to be the most interesting one. The woman who died in 1972 but still walks the earth. She wasn't very friendly to me, though. She didn't want to let me hold the baby."

There was a cold sensation in the pit of John's stomach. Doctor Braun smiled at him, and took off her glasses. And her eyes had been… dark brown, before, hadn't they? John was pretty sure about that. But now they were pale blue and hauntingly familiar.

"Not like you. You're… _nice_. You've got such _nice eyes_ ," she said, her German accent replaced with a Scots one. Then she stood and reached around to the nape of her neck, loosening strings and pulling off what John now could see was her wig.

"Dull, though," Doctor Braun… or _Elizabeth_... said, in a BBC-caliber English accent, "In the future, it might be useful to note that while therapists are _paid_ to listen to you drone on about yourself, women you're trying to seduce really aren't. Save it for the blog."

She tugged out the elastic holding her inky, ungreyed locks in a bun and looked at him levelly, and John stammered, "Elizabeth… I'm… I'm sorry about the way… wait, what the hell? _Why_ are you doing this?"

"Aww," she laughed, with that same sweet smile that had caught his eye in the summer, "You really haven't figured it out yet. It was never about _you,_ silly. It's all... about… Sherlock."

"Sherlock? My friend, Sherlock. Who you met when came here to fetch me?"

"Well, yes, but I met him before that. A _long_ time ago. _And_ we spent the night together."

John blinked, and then finally said, "What?"

"It was _lovely_. We had chips, and walked for hours. He was very sweet. That's when I gave him Faith's note… did he tell you about that? I added a few deductions to make it more interesting."

She started looking through a drawer in the side table and John started getting to his feet, because this was getting alarming. But Elizabeth turned around and leveled a gun at his head and said, quite calmly, "He missed the big one, though. Do sit down, John, I have to think the therapist who actually lives here wouldn't want blood on the carpet."

John sat. Elizabeth frowned, wrinkling her forehead, and said, "Oh, hang on, it's fine. She's in a sack in the airing cupboard."

John raised his hands… slowly, and tried to smile reassuringly and not fixate on the gun, and started, "All right, Elizabeth, obviously something's happened here-"

" _No_ ," she said, all staccato, "Not Elizabeth. Not Faith. Not Inga. _Eurus_."

"Okay," John smiled, "Eurus. That's a _pretty_ name-"

"Oh _please_ don't patronize me, it's tedious. It's a terrible name, _no idea_ what my parents were thinking, they gave all of us such silly names. Eurus… Sherlock… big brother Mycroft got the worst of it, clearly they didn't love _him_ at all."

And now, incomprehensible as it was, a picture started to come clear in John's mind. When she smiled widely the skin around her eyes formed into the same crinkles that Sherlock's did, and she was practically grinning now.

"The name's Greek. It means the east wind. And _there,_ you've got it now, haven't you? That's nice. Now off you pop."

She fired.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter a lot of Eurus's lines are cribbed from "The Lying Detective." This is because like all Holmes siblings she preplans everything she does to make herself look cooler and this includes coming up with her dialogue in advance even if the situation doesn't quite work the way she intended.


	11. Funhouse

John woke up. That was a bit of a surprise, but quite a nice one given that the last thing he remembered was being shot in the head.

He had a blinding headache, and double vision, although the latter faded within a few minutes of his struggling to a seated position and pulling the little metal tranquilizer dart out of his neck. He was alone. So John hoisted himself to his feet and started searching.

He opened three doors: kitchen, bathroom… and then finally airing cupboard. The tiny room was obviously well-ventilated and dry, but as soon as he'd got in there was _definitely_ a smell. The sack, a big striped canvas thing designed to carry laundry from place to place, was tucked tidily into a corner next to the washing machine.

John, steeling himself, reached down and twitched the drawstring closure off to one side.

Then he covered the face back up, more gently. Doctor Inga Braun, who John had never really met. She was well dead… it'd take an expert to say for how long, but medical school followed by years of experience with Sherlock suggested days-to-weeks. He didn't try to investigate exactly how.

It was sunny outside, one of the false February days that make you think winter is over only to knock you down with the cold once the sun goes down. John's bicycle was still chained to the fence, the streets were just as quiet as they had been when he'd gone in… less than fifty minutes earlier.

She'd screwed him out of part of the therapeutic hour, hadn't she?

John rubbed the back of his neck, took his mobile out of his pocket and dialed.

Sherlock picked up on the second ring and skipped over any greeting to begin with a puppyishly excited, "JOHN, Faith Smith was _real_! I didn't invent her, at least not entirely. I found her note and it says-"

"Yeah, Sherlock, I know, we need to talk," John interrupted him.

"You know _what_?"

"That a woman claiming to be Faith Smith met you at your flat. Look, I know that your family's… a bit quirky, and you don't necessarily have a typical relationship with Mycroft… but do you by any chance have a sister you never thought to mention to me?"

"Are you drunk? Of course I don't have a sister. Mycroft is quite enough in the sibling department."

John sighed. This was going to be unpleasant.

"Right, so, remember how I told you about Elizabeth, the woman-"

"The tart on the bus. Yes, that _has_ occupied some of my attention of late."

"Right. So-"

So after the most embarrassing conversation in the history of the universe, a free visit from Lestrade and his pals in the Homicide and Serious Crime division, and a deeply awkward cab ride back to his flat, John found himself standing in front of his wife. Mary sat silently while Sherlock and John explained their respective halves of this peculiar story and frowned up at them.

She was wearing a black tunic and trousers. Mary wore a lot of black lately, in what John suspected was some sort of feminine form of communication or commentary that he was too thick to get. When Sherlock finished up his bit, with the, "Miss me" written in linseed oil on the note, she finally said, "I don't understand."

"Join the club," Sherlock and John said in unison.

"Like a full sister? Not like your Dad had a side piece somewhere and you didn't know about her until now? And you have _no_ memory of her? How is that even... possible?"

"I truly don't know. It verges on the absurd, but when you have eliminated the impossible..." Sherlock said, pacing the floor.

"There's usually a whole bunch of other possible things you haven't even thought of," John muttered.

"More to the point, how did you miss that the therapist and Faith Smith were the same person?" She angled her head at John and continued on with a sardonic, "I know that this one here just sees us as interchangeable pairs of tits that can talk but it really seems out of character for _you,_ Sherlock."

"You know, Mary, I've had a _really_ shit day-"John began, but he was interrupted by Sherlock who clapped his hands together loudly and said, "Much as I always do enjoy hosting these impromptu marriage counseling sessions for you two we have work to do here. Can we focus?"

He got down on one knee in front of Mary where she sat on the sofa, and took both her hands in his, looking for all the world like he was about to ask her to marry him.

"There was something she said that was important, did you catch it? John didn't recognize her because he's notoriously unobservant, I didn't recognize her because I was extraordinarily high on both occasions that I encountered her… but _you_ are neither of these things."

Sherlock's voice was soothing and low, and he smiled gently up at Mary.

"The human mind is a truly remarkable instrument, Mary, and nothing is ever truly lost. So what I need you to do now, is close your eyes, and together we'll step back… to a memory you might not even be aware you still have, a tiny moment in your life, a-"

Mary had not closed her eyes. She squeezed Sherlock's hands and said, "Sweetie, I did _technically_ go to school for this. You're wondering about the woman who I didn't want to hold the baby."

She let him go and leaned back on the couch, folded her hands in her lap and stared up at the ceiling.

"It was last July. A… tuesday, though if you want the exact date I'd have to go look at my diary. I took Rosie for an airing at the recreation ground over by the river. Well, actually I mostly took _me_ for an airing, and she came along, I don't know how much she got out of it. They have a nice little playground and she likes to play in the sandpit. She struck up a conversation with me while I was eating my lunch and we chatted for a few minutes."

Mary refocused her gaze on Sherlock, and continued, "I really can't tell you much about her… long blonde hair and blue eyes, but you can fake that sort of thing very easily. White. Slender. Taller than me but not tall, so maybe five six? Beautiful. Young."

Mary's glanced over at John as she said that last, and for just a second he could see the hurt back in her face and his guts twisted. But then she cleared her throat and the moment passed.

"If I'd had to guess her age I'd say maybe ten years younger than you, Sherlock. No more than thirty."

Sherlock, unbelievably, frowned at this and said, "I admit that it's been a rough thirty-seven for me but that _is_ all that it is."

"January sixth nineteen seventy _nine_!" John exclaimed, despite himself. Sherlock and Mary gave him matched flat-eyed gazes and returned their attention to one another.

"She was Irish… or she had an Irish accent, anyway, and if she was putting that on then she's _good_ , because that's one of mine and I didn't notice a thing the matter with hers. And she didn't look much like you, though I suppose Mycroft doesn't really either. Although…"

Mary smiled, and brushed her thumb over Sherlock's zygomatic arch, "There were _definitely_ cheekbones. That's really all I've got."

John frowned, and asked, "How long was this conversation?"

Mary shrugged, "Five, ten minutes."

"And you just… _remember_ it, from seven months ago, 'cause you had it tucked up in your mind palace, which you learned about in assassin school."

"Spy school," Mary said levelly, though she set her jaw, "Where we called it 'the method of loci,' and for me, it's always been more like reading a map."

Sherlock had sat back, folded his legs up and steepled his hands below his mouth, but he commented from his own thoughts, "Adding the third dimension squares the amount of information you are able to store."

"If you're a genius, which I'm not," Mary commented dryly, "There's an upper limit on it for most of us, Sherlock. And you'll notice _I_ can find things without having to wave my hands in front of my face like I'm being attacked by mosquitoes."

"Therefore you remembered this incident… because it was unusual or alarming in some way. Tell me, Mary, why _didn't_ you want to let her hold Rosie?"

Mary hesitated, dry washing her hands together.

"It… there wasn't anything _overtly_ wrong about her. And it's not like I want people just in general to hold Rosie. It's horrible when she gets ill and she catches every virus that comes within a hundred yards. But…

" _Every_ other woman at that playground was with a child, or a baby. But she was all alone, and she was wearing a _lot_ of makeup. It was good, it wasn't overdone, but it was a lot: full face, contoured and highlighted and bronzed and winged eyeliner, the whole bit. _And_ she was wearing a wig. A good lace-front one, but you can always tell when you're close up. But her fingernails weren't painted at all, and bitten down to the quicks, and something about all that together made me think, "Okay, am I looking at a disguise right now?"

She shrugged.

"So when she asked if she could hold her I lied and said Rosie didn't do well with strangers. And then a few minutes later she left."

"You thought there might be a threat to _Rosie_ ," John said, "And even _then_ you still didn't come to me."

"No, for about two minutes I thought that there might be a threat to Rosie, and then it didn't materialize so I thought that I had _actually_ met a lonely, slightly weird woman, who made some questionable styling decisions and admired my cute baby. Which meant that I had _once again_ got it wrong because I don't actually always _know_ how to be a normal person and turn that part of my brain off."

Her voice was tremulous, now, and she said, "I've always been clear, John, that your… your _tolerance_ for my past was dependent on your _never_ having to know about it. So how _could_ I tell you?"

Sherlock glared at John, and mouthed 'Fix. This," silently, before rising to his feet and pacing the room.

"Mary, I… I didn't mean to make you think-"

"It doesn't matter now," she said, with an air of finality, "We have to help Sherlock."

The detective in question paced, and asked, "Did she give you a name, by chance?"

"She did, actually. It was Aella. Aella Burke."

"Aella. From the latin," Sherlock mused, "It means… the storm wind."

Sherlock stopped in his tracks.

" _Someone_ has clearly been dogging our movements for months now, and she has committed at least one murder of an innocent bystander in the process. I need to find out who she is."

"Are you going to talk to your parents?" John asked. Sherlock shook his head.

"No. I'm going to talk to _Mycroft_ ," and it shouldn't have been possible for him to hiss a word with no sibilants but somehow Sherlock managed it, "All my life, 'The East Wind's coming, Sherlock. It's coming to _get_ you.' Bastard. He knows something."

"Sherlock, I don't really know Mycroft except by reputation, but… he's not going to just tell you a secret if he's been keeping it for that long. If you've got a mind palace he's got a bank vault."

"Yeah, but people _do_ break into bank vaults, though," John contradicted her, "You just need to find the right way in. Love or fear might do it. Probably fear, for him."

At that, Sherlock smiled widely. It was always slightly unsettling when he did that.

"Ah, the advantages of growing up with someone. I know just the thing. Come, John. We need to go hire a scary clown."


	12. Sisters

One of the great underrated pleasures of life was screwing with Mycroft Holmes, and this particular occasion… was _epic_. John was especially proud of the simple mechanism he had devised to make the portraits in the gallery weep 'blood,' really a corn syrup and food dye recipe he'd found online.

Then the next morning Mycroft materialized at Baker Street and it stopped being entertaining.

As suspected, there were in fact _three_ Holmes kids. All of them obviously had their quirks, but Eurus… the baby, the smart one, the incandescent one… Eurus was disturbed, from a very young age.

"Describe," Sherlock said.

Mycroft twiddled the plain gold band he wore on his right ring finger, and said, "They found her with a knife once. She seemed to be cutting herself. Mother and Father were terrified. They thought it was a suicide attempt. But when I asked Eurus what she was doing, she said,'I wanted to see how my muscles worked.'"

"Jesus," John muttered.

Mycroft eyed him and continued in the same neutral tone, "So I asked her if she felt pain, and she replied, 'Which one's pain?'"

John rubbed his forehead. Nobody with any sense ever believed in Sherlock's clearly self-diagnosed "High-functioning sociopathy," but that kind of insensitivity to physical pain was a terrifyingly bad sign of a personality disorder in a child that young.

Mycroft continued, "All of this happened when you were seven, Sherlock-"

"All of _what_ happened?" Sherlock demanded icily.

"And we were still living in Musgrave." The iceman actually smiled faintly, "The ancestral home, where there was always honey for tea, and Sherlock played among the funny gravestones."

"Funny how?" John asked.

"They weren't real. The dates were all wrong. A Victorian architectural quirk added on to a much older substrate… the place had an artificial ruin and a turreted tower glued onto one end too. Sherlock was fascinated by them."

Sherlock sang, softly, and eerily high-pitched, "Who will find me, deep down below the old beech tree? Help succor me now, the east winds blow. Sixteen by six, and under we go."

"You remember," Mycroft said flatly.

"Fragments, only. And Redbeard."

"Yes, Redbeard. Sherlock's Irish Setter," Mycroft added, for John's benefit, "Eurus took him, locked him up somewhere no one could find him, and she refused to say where he was. She'd only repeat that song. We begged and begged her to tell us where he was and all she said was, 'the song is the answer.' But the song made _no sense_."

There was that indefinable Holmesian fury at an unsolvable mystery about Mycroft's tone. Sherlock asked him curiously, "What happened to Redbeard?"

"Well, we never found him, but she started calling him 'Drowned Redbeard,' so we made our assumptions. You were traumatised, Sherlock. You were an… emotional boy, but after that you changed. You never spoke of it again. And in time, you forgot that Eurus had ever even existed."

"Yeah, I'm still not getting that," John said, "She was living with you."

"No. She was taken away."

John spluttered, "Okay, I know we're all living in a Gothic novel now but _come on_ . In this day and age you don't lock up a mentally ill _child_ because a dog goes missing."

Mycroft pressed his thin lips together, "Indeed. However, immediately afterwards…"

He rubbed at his forehead, and said, "Sherlock, what you need to understand is that she was an _overt_ threat to you. She was making… terrifying drawings of your death. And ultimately she lit a fire in her bedroom, which gutted the house. We never lived there again, and were very fortunate to escape with our lives. Therefore, she was institutionalized. Where she started another fire, which this time, she did not survive."

"And _there's_ the lie," Sherlock said flatly.

Mycroft glanced at John, for some reason, and said, "Yes, there it is. This is the story that we told our parents to spare them further pain and account for the absence of an identifiable body."

"Nice to see you've kept up with that schtick for so long after you invented it," John commented mildly.

"I didn't _invent_ it," Mycroft sneered, "Being thirteen years old at the time. But our Uncle Rudi, who formerly held the minor administrative position that I now occupy, decided on the plan of action and when I was informed of it some years later I agreed with him. Eurus's capabilities combined with the depth of her psychosis meant that she can never be contained in an ordinary institution."

"So where is she, Mycroft? Where's our sister?"

"Safe. In an island facility meant to contain the uncontainables. It's utterly secure, utterly secret… and utterly inescapable. She's been there since early childhood, and she hasn't left for so much as a day."

Mycroft shrugged his bespoke-suited shoulders.

"The fact that you've _both_ met a woman claiming to be her is an alarming development in and of itself, but whoever that woman _was_ … it wasn't her. It can't have been."

Just then there was a clatter of broken glass, a soft, childlike voice started singing, and a toy quadcopter flew in from the kitchen. Mycroft drew in a hissed breath and snapped out a "Get back and stay _still_ " in tones that left no room for argument.

"It's a drone," Sherlock said curiously.

"With a grenade on," John agreed, very much not moving.

"It's a DX-707," Mycroft muttered, "I've authorized the purchase of quite a few. There's a motion sensor, and it's activated. If any of us move, the grenade will detonate."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, why would anyone _invent_ something like that?" John groaned. Sherlock ignored him and asked quite calmly, "How powerful?"

"This flat will be destroyed and we'll all die, should it detonate. The walls here are thick so your neighbors should be safe, but… yes, it's landed on the floor."

"God, Mrs. Hudson," John gasped.

"She's hoovering. Going by her usual routine she's got about another two minutes," Sherlock said.

John exhaled.

"Right. She keeps the vacuum in the cupboard at the back of the flat. That'll probably be the safest time."

"Safest time for what?" Mycroft asked. John glanced over at Sherlock, who replied on his behalf, "For us to begin to move. Once she stops, we'll give her… eight seconds. When we're mobile, how long until the detonation?"

Mycroft's voice was tremulous when he said, "We'll have a maximum of three seconds to vacate the blast radius."

"Jesus," John muttered.

"John, we'll take the windows, Mycroft, you're for the stairs. If you make it, get Mrs. Hudson out too. Can we make a phone call?" Sherlock asked.

"What?"

"John has a wife and a child. He might wish to say goodbye."

Mycroft looked over to John with the most sympathy he'd ever seen out of the man.

"I'm sorry, Doctor Watson. Any movement will set off the grenade. I hope you understand."

"Oh, Mycroft," John grinned humorlessly, "If you live and I don't _you're_ going to have to deal with Mary, not me. We'll see which of us is better off."

The noise of the vacuum cleaner stopped. John started counting under his breath, "Eight… seven… six… five… four…"

"Good luck, John, Mycroft," Sherlock murmured, and joined him for, "Three.. Two… one… GO!"

John was barely through the glass of the window when there was a roar, a tsunami force pushed him forward, and the world went white.

* * *

 

He did get to make that phone call, afterwards, as they sped north in Mycroft's personal car, from which he had expelled his driver. He didn't really expect Mary to pick up, but she did, with a, "Yes, John."

"Are you and Rosie all right?" he blurted.

"We're fine," Mary said, and John exhaled in relief, before she continued, "I mean Mycroft Holmes's PA Andrea just kidnapped us and shoved us into a town car and we're apparently being taken to a safe house, but otherwise, you know, things are pretty relaxed here. What the hell's going on?"

"We're securing everyone who might be at risk. Eurus Holmes blew up Baker Street."

"What?" Mary exclaimed, "Oh, my God, are _you_ all right?"

He was a bit surprised she asked, but he replied, "I'm fine." Though his ears, knees, and ankles would probably never be the same. You _could_ jump out of a second story window without breaking anything but it did your body no favors.

"And Sherlock and Martha?"

"Shaken up, but okay. Mycroft too."

"I could care less if Mycroft Holmes were actually alight right now."

John glanced over to the front seat of the car to see Mycroft, deep in conversation with his brother, and his mouth quirked up in a smile, despite everything, "Yeah, I kinda get that. Just saying it for completeness."

"Why did she do that?"

John sighed.

"Why do any of the Holmes kids do anything? I'm sure there's a reason, but I've no idea what it is. We don't even know how she made it happen, 'cause she lives, apparently, in Azkaban. We're going up there to try and sort things out."

There was a silence, in which John could faintly hear Rosie's happy babble near at hand. Finally, Mary said, "So you're running off after her."

John rubbed the creases on his forehead, and said, "Mary, I swear to you, that isn't what this is about _at all_..."

"Oh, shut up, John," Mary snapped crabbily… and surprisingly. "You spent six months sleeping in your office and calling me an assassin, I am _entitled_ to be petty and bitchy about this for at _least_ ten more minutes. Of course I understand that. And of course you have to go. Sherlock needs your help, and if she's a threat to him then she's a threat to all of us. Where are you going?"

"Like I said, Azkaban. Almost literally. It's an ultra-high security facility for the most dangerous criminals in Europe, top secret, called Sherrinford. Somewhere up in the North Sea. Do you know it?"

"Never heard of it."

"Really?"

"You… just because I know _some_ secret intelligence things doesn't mean I know _all_ of them, John."

"I guess not. But…" he hesitated, "I never really asked you about any of that. I don't actually _know_ what your life was like before I knew you."

"I- Well I mean, no, you don't."

They sat in silence for a minute, then Mary said, "Probably not the right time to talk about it, though."

"No, probably not."

"Can you phone me when you get there?"

"I…" John tried to think of how to explain the insane hijacking plan that the brothers were assembling across from him, "No, I'm sorry. We don't know if the facility is compromised, or who we can trust. We're going in completely dark, no communications, no nothing."

"I _see_ ," Mary replied, "Look, I'm going to put Rosie on for a second, okay? So she can hear your voice, just… just in case."

There was a brief fumbling interlude, and then John could hear Mary in the background, saying, "Okay, there she is."

"Hi Rosie," John said, smiling to try and make his voice gentle, "It's Daddy. I'm going to go away for a little bit, so you be good for your Mummy, all right? I'll be back with you soon. I love you."

Rosie mulled that one over and eventually asked, "Duh-dee?" She'd never said that before, and in the background John heard Mary exclaim, "Oh, you clever _clever_ girl. That's right! It's daddy!"

"Did you hear that?" she said, now directly into the phone, "She did you first!"

"I did," John answered, with a genuine smile now, because when Mary was happy it was infectious, "I knew all the bribery would pay off."

"Oh, _John_ ," she whispered. Then Mary cleared her throat, and said roughly, "You come back home safe to us, John Watson. I'm not through with you yet."

They rang off. John switched his mobile off and leaned his head back onto the headrest.

"What is _Azkaban_?" Mycroft asked him curiously from the front.

"Is it a code between the two of you?" Sherlock added on.

John chuckled ruefully.

"Something like that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge swathes of dialogue, particularly Mycroft's, are taken from 'The Final Problem.'


	13. Sherrinford

The mandatory theatrical nonsense component of the adventure didn't really kick in until they'd secured the crew of their hijacked fishing boat, with all due politeness, in the hold. That's when Mycroft took a small inlaid leather cosmetics case out from one of the pockets of his voluminous greatcoat and started applying a prosthetic nose to himself.

The Mycroft Holmes headache was apparently more of a diffuse thing all over the top of the skull than the stabbing over-the-right-eye Sherlock Holmes one. John pinched the bridge of his nose and asked, "What are you doing?"

"Putting on my _disguise_ ," Mycroft said primly.

"Idiotic," Sherlock proclaimed.

"Yeah, it's a bit-" John agreed.

"Prosthetics _look fake_ ," Sherlock said, "A _good_ disguise consists simply of creating a character who is so appropriate in the situation in which you find him that the mind decides there's no merit in looking at him any further than you already have."

He was tucking his own curly hair under a knit cap, and John sighed, "So we're meant to be wearing disguises."

"Naturally," Sherlock and Mycroft said in unison.

"I didn't bring a disguise," he replied.

"Why not?" Sherlock inquired.

"I wasn't told I'd need one, we didn't stop at my flat where I keep my things, and I don't actually _own_ any."

"Really, Doctor Watson, that's rather amateurish of you," Mycroft drawled. John frowned and was going to say something _very_ cutting and witty but Sherlock cut him off with an, "Actually, no, we can make this work. Because _you're_ a recognizable public figure."

"Not… not quite as much as I thought, actually."

But on John's minor-celebrity status and tragic lack of disguise, the plan was pinned.

Sherrinford, when they finally got there, was a grey square fortress squatting like a toad on the windswept rocks of a small island. The radio crackled with a very serious voice saying, " _Golf Whiskey X-ray, this is a restricted area, repeat, restricted area. You are off course. Are you receiving?_ "

The three of them looked at one another in silence. The radio crackled again, " _Golf Whiskey X-ray, you are off course. Are you receiving?_ "

"I believe that's our cue," Sherlock murmured, "Gentlemen, I'll see you on the other side."

As Sherlock went off to take one of the boat's two inflatable life rafts ashore, John found the "transmit" button and radioed in a distress call.

So, yadda yadda, John and Mycroft landed the other dinghy, they were arrested (by, among others, Sherlock, who was _not_ gentle about it), and they were locked up in a caged, concrete lined room.

Sherrinford's governor was a balding,dark, middle aged man with just a hint of Punjabi about his very posh accent. When he came into the room, Mycroft exclaimed, "This is a mistake. I'm the victim 'ere. This man stole my boat. 'E's a _pirate_."

John had been told, "Just be sort of… sarcastic and unpleasant. So, yourself, really," and therefore he replied, "Well that's a _gross_ mischaracterization. I'm a hijacker, at worst."

"I dun even know who this man is!" Mycroft said in his ridiculous… Cornish?... accent. The governor chuckled and said, "He's Captain John Watson, formerly of the fifth Northumberland fusiliers, and currently the Boswell to Sherlock Holmes's Johnson. What _are_ you doing here?"

"You know," John said, "It was bloody Apple maps. I was _trying_ to get to Guildford, and I really think I should have taken the A320, but it sent me off on the A247 instead and then it all just went a bit mad."

The governor smirked, announced, "I want eyes on Eurus Holmes, _now_. Go to the special unit, deploy green and yellow shifts, on my authority," and then handed a security badge to _Sherlock._ Without looking at him at all. John rolled his eyes.

"This is rather absurd of you to be doing, isn't it, Doctor Watson, Mr. Holmes? We're all on the same side, after all."

"'Rather absurd' _is_ the story of my life," John said.

"And I'm not at all certain we're on the same side," Mycroft said, in his own voice. The governor frowned.

"It's not a very convincing costume, you know," he said to Mycroft, "Didn't you say that 'The true art of disguise is not being looked at?'"

"Actually _I_ said that, in the blog," John replied, "Sherlock said something much more dickish and less eloquent."

"And in fact you didn't look at _him._ You handed _him_ your pass and sent him down to meet our sister," Mycroft said, taking off his carefully applied false nose, "You're looking at _me_. I wish I could say I was pleased to see you again, Mr. Iqbal. But I am _very_ far from that."

The way the governor went white with terror upon recognizing him went a long way to explaining what a domineering cock Mycroft was.

Anyway, yadda yadda, they all went to the governor's office, where Mycroft embarked on an overbred-superior-officer haranguing which John, having spent a decade and a half in the army, was easily able to tune out. Instead, he watched the video monitors showing Eurus Holmes and her (apparently strictly prohibited) interview with a psychiatrist.

Now that he knew who he was looking at, the resemblence between her and Sherlock, stronger than between either of them and Mycroft, was obvious. Same razorblade cheekbones, same big hair, same dramatic coloring. She was wearing oversized hospital scrubs and sitting cross-legged on the floor of her cell.

She had a soft, sad voice, and when she asked the doctor, "Why am I here? No one ever tells me. Am I being punished?" John couldn't help but feel sorry for her, murderer or no.

He'd _liked_ Elizabeth. He wouldn't have kept on with texting her if he hadn't. She'd been sweet but kind of sarcastic, and told very funny though now obviously invented stories about her work as a primary school teacher. He'd liked Inga too, when he thought of it, she'd been straightforward and intelligent and quite a decent therapist. Even though it was all lies, John found that he couldn't look at her face and quite ignore the old sentiments.

John shivered. Sherrinford was striking him as a terrible place. Even the governor's office was cold and damp. And Eurus's cell had nothing… just a bed and a bare table, nothing to make it cozy or personal. For all Sherlock went on about how the life of the mind was the only thing that mattered, he loved his creature comforts and the reassuring presence of his possessions. The destruction of Baker Street had hurt him more than he was trying to let on. He'd go giddy bonkers if he had to spend any amount of time just locked in with himself.

And Eurus had been in there, having 'the strict minimum amount of human interaction,' since she was… what, six? Or seven? Nearly thirty years.

John couldn't grasp that. How someone could take a _child_ and condemn them to this existence. He tried to imagine if Rosie grew up a bit more, had something bad the matter with her mind… and then taking her and leaving her someplace like this, and he couldn't do it. No matter what she'd done. He'd help her get away with it before he did that. Obviously if it _really_ was a situation of saving another child by putting away their sibling, then that was a worse situation, but-

The discussion (row) between Mycroft and the governor interrupted his train of thought.

"Everyone we sent in there; it-it's hard to describe," Doctor Iqbal said, stammering, "It's like she-"

"Recruited them," Mycroft replied flatly.

"Enslaved them," Iqbal said.

"She's been capable of that since she was five. She's an adult now. I warned you… I _ordered_ you."

"A mind like that needs to be _studied_ ," Iqbal exclaimed, "We had to try."

"At what cost?" Mycroft asked, "What has she done? The worst thing."

Iqbal looked down at his hands, and said, "She kept suggesting to Doctor Taylor that he should kill his family. He said it was like an earworm; he couldn't quite get it out of his head. He left."

"And?" Mycroft said.

"Killed himself."

" _And..?_ " Mycroft said.

"His family."

And did John feel just a little bit shittily vindicated by this? Yes, all right, he decided, he _did_. Because ultimately when presented with the opportunity of quite a hot woman who was _also_ allegedly such a master manipulator that she was able to talk a psychiatrist into murder-suicide… John Watson had said, "Thanks but no thanks."

Except… really, examining their interactions… _nothing_ she'd said had been at all out of the common. He probably would have acted exactly the same way if she had actually just been an ordinary woman. The sort of ordinary woman who'd hit on an obviously-married stranger who she met on the bus simply because of his 'nice eyes.'

John rubbed the back of his neck. Looking back on it now there had been some fairly serious red flags about that relationship from the very beginning. Also he was _possibly_ an opportunistic asshole.

" _You_ speak to her," the Governor muttered sulkily.

" _I'm_ her brother, _I_ know what I'm doing."

"Like when you bought her her Christmas gift, Mr. Holmes? What were you doing then? Because that's when it all started. That's when she _changed_."

Mycroft Holmes, for just an instant, looked at John guiltily.

"I took a calculated risk."

"What risk?" John asked the two men.

Mycroft rolled his eyes.

"Eurus doesn't just talk to people, she reprograms them. Anyone who spends time with her is automatically compromised."

Which sounded like an absolute heap of self-serving bullshit said by people who wanted to justify their own behavior, frankly. And John should know.

"Come _on_ ," he said, "She's not magic. You can't just talk to someone and… mind-control them."

"Perhaps _you_ can't," Mycroft said, scoffing dismissively. John folded his hands into fists and turned away so that Mycroft wouldn't see the angry color rising in his face. So that's why he was looking directly into Eurus' eyes when she stared into the camera and asked her unseen psychiatrist, "Do you trust your wife?"

And the honest answer that popped into John's mind was, "No."

"I don't trust _you_ ," the psychiatrist said, barely audibly.

"I'm only trying to help you," Eurus said, with a faint-but-earnest smile, "Helping someone… is the best way to help yourself."

John frowned as Eurus continued, "Bring me your wife. I want to meet her."

She'd done that to _him_ , too, John realized, and he turned the volume up just a bit, as the unseen psychiatrist said, "I don't need your help." In a very posh accent with just a hint of Punjabi.

John tapped on his earpiece and said, "Sherlock, something isn't right here."

"Not now, John," Sherlock replied curtly.

" _Vatican cameos_ ," John murmured.

" _Not now._ "

The line went dead. On the screen, Eurus was saying, "You have no idea how I can help. I can fix her for you, then give her back, good as new. I promise."

"Mycroft," John said.

"What?" Mycroft snapped.

"Listen to the tape," John said, as the unseen man's voice pleaded, "This is completely inappropriate."

"That's… that's your voice, right?" John said to the governor, "If she enslaves people, by talking to them, then what did she do to _you?_ "

The governor laughed, a soft, barely-audible puff.

"What didn't she do?" he said bitterly.

"Doctor Iqbal…" Mycroft began leerily, as the governor took a panic button out of the pocket of his jacket.

"I'm terribly sorry," Iqbal said, pressing the button.

Alarms sounded, and armed men ran into the office. John made a break for it.

He bolted through the hallways carved out of the rock, searching for… Sherlock? An escape? He wasn't quite sure, because the claxons were now accompanied by an American-accented voice calling, "Red alert! Red alert!" and that voice was creepily familiar.

Climbing a flight of stairs, three men on his heels, John came into a control room of some sort. On every screen, Jim Moriarty's mad, smiling face grinned out at him.

"Did you miss me?" Moriarty asked.

This time John knew what he was being shot with was just a tranquilizer gun. Despite that, the horror was pretty much the same, as he slid into darkness.


	14. Wives

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reader Warning: The fic earns its rating for violence in this chapter

John woke up with the same blinding headache and double vision he'd had the last time he had been tranquilized, which was… yes, literally less than three days ago. The experience wasn't enhanced by Sherlock's upside-down face peering worriedly at him.

He mumbled, "I'm not all that fond of whatever she keeps giving me."

"Amateur," Sherlock scoffed mildly, "Xylazine is basically a pleasant Tuesday night treat."

"Is this really the moment for your juvenile drug addict humor?" Mycroft said, from where he was leaning against the wall of what John could now see was their cell.

"Oh, it's always the moment for juvenile drug addict humor, brother dear," Sherlock said, helping John to his feet. The governor was seated on the floor of the cell, back against the glass wall, head hanging over his knees.

"Shit, Sherlock," John said, suddenly remembering, "He's working for Moriarty."

"I told you, John, Moriarty's dead. The occasion is _very_ clear in my mind," Sherlock replied absently, looking around the cell with his ordinary curious gaze, "He's working for Eurus. She's in charge now."

John hesitantly asked, "Did you get to see her?"

"Yes."

"How did it go?"

"We had a bit of a natter about our sex lives, then she boxed my ears and tried to cut off my windpipe."

"Yeah, I've never got on with Harry, either."

"Abbott, Costello, _can_ we focus?" Mycroft said. Needlessly, since a phone began to ring, broadcasting through hidden speakers somewhere in the walls. The connection was made, and a small high-pitched voice called out:

"Hello? Help me… please, I'm on a plane and everyone's asleep. Please, help me!"

The lighting changed to an ominous blood-red, and Jim Moriarty's merry, mad voice purred, "Hello. My name's Jim Moriarty. Welcome… to the final problem."

"Chatty, for a dead guy," John commented.

"What is this insanity?" Mycroft spat.

"This is a recorded announcement. Now please say hello to some very old friends of mine," Moriarty said smoothly, and the lights switched back to the bright white.

The little girl on the phone said hesitantly, "Hello? I can hear you talking. Please help me! I'm on a plane and it's going to crash!"

"Eurus, stop this. Stop it n _ow,_ " Mycroft shouted.

"Is someone there?" the little girl asked, "I can hear you talking."

"Yes, ah, hello," Sherlock began, "I'm here. Where are you?"

"I'm in a plane and everyone but me's asleep and it's going to _crash_!" she cried.

"No, it isn't," John said, "We'll help you, you just have to be brave. What's your name?"

"I'm not supposed to tell my name to strangers," the little girl said, snuffling.

"Good," Sherlock said, "Very wise. But we don't have to be strangers. _My_ name's Sherlock-"

The line went dead. A large TV screen on one wall popped into life, showing Eurus Holmes sitting in an office chair.

She was smiling.

"Anyway," she began, "Now that we're all awake, we can begin."

"Eurus," Mycroft said darkly, "How did you do this?"

"You put me in here, brother mine, you brought me my presents… what did you think I'd do with all that spare time?" Eurus kept on smiling, but the edge of menace showed through now.

The lights changed colors again, and Jim Moriarty chirped, "Clever Eurus! You go, girl!"

"How _did_ she get to meet Moriarty, Mycroft?" Sherlock growled.

"Oh, he recorded _lots_ of little messages for me before he died," Eurus said blithely, "He loved it. Did you know that _his_ older brother... was a station master? Seriously. But he'd _never_ let him have a go at the tannoy."

Sherlock rolled his eyes and said, "The girl – where is she? Can I talk to her again?"

"Poor little thing," Eurus sighed theatrically, "All alone in the sky in a great big plane with nowhere to land. But where in the world _is_ she? It's a clever little puzzle. If you want to apply yourself to it, I _can_ reconnect you; but first…"

She rolled her chair off to one side. Behind her, John could now see another woman: dark, pretty, in a silky grey blouse and black skirt. She was tied into a chair, and duct tape covered her mouth. Her eyes were wide with terror, and she was struggling against her restraints.

Iqbal clambered to his feet and hurried over to the screen, shouting, "Aisha! That's my wife! Oh, God, that's my _wife_."

"First," Eurus said, aiming a gun at the other woman, "I'm going to shoot the governor's wife. In about a minute, bang, dead. Now, you _can_ stop me, Sherlock."

"How?" asked Sherlock.

"There's a gun in the hatch. Take it. You want to save the governor's wife? Choose either Doctor Watson or Mycroft to kill the governor."

John puffed out a bitter laugh as a small hatch next to the glass wall of their cell slid open. Sherlock walked over and pulled out a small handgun, checking the magazine.

"Two bullets," he mused.

"Oh, God," Iqbal moaned despairingly.

"Not you Sherlock. You don't count. Your brother, or your friend. If _you_ do it I'll kill her anyway."

Iqbal straightened up. He tugged at the lapels of his jacket, and said quietly to Sherlock, "You have to do this. Eurus _will_ kill her."

Sherlock sighed, "It doesn't appear we have a choice." Taking the gun by the barrel, he extended it to his brother, who backed away a step as if repelled.

"The countdown is starting," Eurus smiled.

"How long?" Mycroft asked shakily.

"No, no, no. The countdown is for _me._ Withholding the precise deadline will apply the emotional pressure more evenly. Where possible, please give me an explicit verbal indication of your anxiety levels. I can't always read them from your behaviour."

Sherlock was still extending the gun to Mycroft, who shook his head and said, "I can't. It's murder."

"This is not murder. She's _innocent._ This is saving her," Iqbal pleaded.

"I'm really quite pleased with this one, actually," Eurus mused, "The classic trolley problem is one innocent actively killed versus five innocents passively killed. Or the rarer "tunnel" variant involving the passive killing of an innocent versus the active destruction of your _self._ This one's even more challenging, I think. Because he's not _that_ bad of a man, really, just weak. Interested in prison reform, helping mad girls, and breeding tropical fish."

Mycroft folded his hands into fists and shook his head in a final denial.

"I will not kill. I will not have blood on my hands."

"All those DX-707s are _normally_ filled with candy and confetti, hm?" John asked bitterly.

Then finally, inevitably, Sherlock turned away from his brother and towards John. Extending the gun. The governor turned to John with an almost pathetic eagerness.

"Doctor Watson. You're wearing a ring. Are you married?"

"Yes," John replied, staring at the gun.

"What would you do, to save her? If she were in danger. Wouldn't you do it?"

The answer to that of course was that John _couldn't_ save Mary, a fact that had been forced down his throat over the last several months. Dealing with the threats she faced just... wasn't in his skillset. He'd been a soldier, but not a combatant, not a spy or an assassin. He'd led her deadly friend straight to her, he couldn't stop her from running into Vivian Norbury's bullet, he'd had to sit staring into space while other people cut her open and saved her life.

"It's… it's not better, necessarily. For her. To be the one left behind," John said, almost to himself.

Iqbal laughed, "It's not even a question of that. Eurus _will_ kill me. But you _can_ save my wife."

The lights flicked to red, and Jim Moriarty's grinning face appeared on the screen, waggling his head in time with his chanting of "Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock."

"There _will_ be regular prompts to create a sense of urgency," Eurus said, sounding almost bored as the lights switched back to normal.

John took the gun out of Sherlock's hand. He took a breath.

"What's your name," he asked Iqbal, "Your first name, I mean."

"David," the older man said simply.

He thought, suddenly, of the other David he knew… Mary's ex, David-the-douchebag. David who made a lot more money than John and couldn't help but bring that up every time they met one another. David who had dropped out of the wedding party for mysterious reasons that had become clarified when he'd got mindbogglingly drunk on Mary's hen night and made a "once more for old time's sake" pass at her.

John had heard that story from Mary's own lips that same evening, when her friends decanted her into their flat and she'd crawled into bed with him, smelling like bourbon and secondhand smoke. She'd been upset by the whole thing, and said sadly into John's chest, "I thought that he was my _friend_."

_He_ hadn't been angry or worried, John remembered. Annoyed, obviously, because it _had_ made Mary sad and also because what sort of arse hits on his ex three years after she dumped you and three _weeks_ before she was going to get married to someone else? But he'd been safe and comfortable, everyone he _cared_ about was safe and comfortable… and his heart was tucked away cozily in Mary's pocket where he'd known, to his bones, that she'd look after it properly.

That peace and safety seemed so far away, standing here holding a gun, preparing to kill a man in cold blood. John wondered how often Mary had stood in this situation, trying to work out the brutal calculus of murder. How it had been to look at Sherlock, her friend, and then to tally up the risk of even a "surgical" gunshot wound to the chest and decide "Yes, it's worth it." He wished, desperately, that she were here, that someone else, someone more _qualified_ , would take this responsibility off his shoulders.

"Are you _sure_ about this, David?" John asked urgently.

"Of course I'm bloody sure," David scoffed.

" _Nearly there_ ," Eurus sing-songed through the speakers.

"Do you want to… did you want to say the _shahada_ , or something? Or I guess I can say it for you, I know the words."

David smiled a tight-lipped grimace.

"My family have been devout Anglicans since the 1890s, Doctor Watson, and therefore _I_ am an atheist. Look around you. Does this look like a world ruled by a God who can be swayed by the prayers of the faithful?"

He puffed out a soft breath of laughter and turned his back on John, straightening his shoulders. "The only one who can help me now is you."

"You're a good man, David. You're doing a good thing," John said, slowly raising the gun.

"So are you," David said softly.

David's hair was thinning, at the top, and flattened where he'd been resting his head against the glass. His shirt collar was disarranged and half of it was overlaying his jacket.

"A good man wouldn't," John said.

And fired.


	15. Lovers

_Dust in the air. Dust in your eyes. Dust in your mouth. The smell of blood and shit and sick_ (That's Mycroft, heaving up his guts in the corner)  _and gunsmoke. Now that the man's not screaming and trying to slit your throat you can see that he's only barely a man, that his beard is patchy and acne marks his cheeks, that when you were his age you were at university and drinking cheap lager and playing Nintendo and trying desperately but mostly unsuccessfully to get laid._

_He probably never got laid at all, living in this country. And now he's very still._

"I can honestly say that I didn't see that coming," Eurus Holmes said.

_You've never in your life had a flashback while awake, so why start now? This is just_ a memory _._

John opened his eyes, swallowed the salt-tasting saliva that had filled his mouth. Sherlock's hand was resting heavily on his shoulder, and the gun was gently pried out of his hand. John didn't need to double-tap, anyway, Iqbal was definitely dead.

Shrugging out of his jacket, John laid it over the top of David's body, covering the ruined skull as carefully as he could.

"I did what you wanted, Eurus," he said, "We kept our part of the bargain. Now let her go."

Eurus, on screen, blinked slowly at him before gesturing to someone off-camera. A very confused-looking man in a guard's uniform came onto the screen, took a folding knife from his pocket, and started sawing at the bonds on the woman's wrists. When he'd undone all her ties, he helped Aisha to her feet and escorted her out. He had an arm around her, cupping her elbow, like she was an old lady he was helping to cross the street.

John let out a shaky breath. It was worth it after all. He'd spend the rest of his life telling himself that.

"Because you don't  _like_  to take on that sort of responsibility normally. You were going to keep on lying to Mary about me, weren't you?"

"Why... why would Doctor Watson lie about her to Mrs. Watson?" Mycroft asked leerily.

"Bus girl," Sherlock replied briefly, pointing at the video monitor. Mycroft's face curdled with revulsion, and the thought that his failings had been the subject of a Holmes brothers conversation in the book-lined strangers room at the Diogenes added an acidic spike of humiliation to John's roiling guts.

"Yeah, I was," he mumbled, "Thanks for sending that phone along. Made everyone's life a lot better."

"Well, it  _really_  hurt my feelings when you broke it off," Eurus replied, rolling her eyes, and with such pure  _Sherlock_  sarcasm in her tone that John felt like he'd have recognized her instantly, had she used it before.

"Didn't it, though, little sister?" Sherlock asked. Eurus gazed at him, flat eyed, and Sherlock smiled sharkily and kept on, "Because  _that_  rather confused  _me_ , at first. John's extraordinarily easy to fool. And he sees dozens of patients a day, knows his bank teller's life story, strikes up conversations with strangers in line rather than be alone with his thoughts for ten minutes. If you wanted to find out about me through him… then why that way? Why  _Elizabeth?_ "

He was doing that punchable face thing again, and John could see Eurus's mouth twitch.

"I suppose that you  _could_  be on Mary's lengthy enemies list, but we've had one bizarre coincidence already regarding that, two would be gratuitous. So I have to wonder, all your life, all alone here in Sherrinford, no friends, no lovers… and no,  _that_  doesn't count… not even a goldfish. Is it possible you simply wanted to be… normal? And have a nice, ordinary man admire you and think you're pretty?"

"As opposed to a nice ordinary man admiring you and thinking you're  _clever?_ " Eurus said, leaning her chin on her hand, "Sherlock, please assume that I have at some point read a book involving the word  _projection_.  _You_  take cases because they allow you to do things that you want to do but think that you can't or shouldn't. I'm under no such ridiculous self-imposed obligation."

She shrugged.

"I did it because it worked. And when it stopped working I did something else."

And that, John supposed, was the most he was ever likely to get… though both Sherlock and Mycroft looked dubious.

"So what, exactly, was the point?" Sherlock asked, "What do you want from me that you went to such lengths?"

"You'll see," Eurus replied. A panel slid aside in their cell, revealing a dim hallway, "Please go through. And bring the gun."

"Why?" Sherlock said, not moving.

"Why do you think? You'll be needing it. Now move along, there's a little girl all alone in the sky, and she's getting  _very_  scared."

The three of them walked out of the cell. Only John looked behind him to see David's crumpled body.

The next room was painted red, with a wide window looking out over the grey ocean. It was empty except for a glass conference table and another video screen. This screen popped into life, and Eurus said, "As a motivation to your continued cooperation, you are now being reconnected."

The little girl asked, hesitantly, "Are you... still there?"

"Yes, hello, we're still here," Sherlock replied, rapid-fire, "Can you hear us?"

"'s," the small voice said.

"Everything's going to be all right," Sherlock said soothingly, "I just need you to tell me where you are. Outside, is it day or night?"

"Night."

"Well that narrows it down to half the planet," Mycroft muttered.

"What kind of plane are you on?" Sherlock asked, glaring at his brother.

"Um, I don't know," she answered softly.

"A big plane?" John asked, "Lots of people on it?"

"Lots and lots, but they're all asleep. I can't wake them up. Even the driver's asleep."

"Where did the plane take off from?"

"My nan's."

Sherlock rolled his eyes, and asked, "And where are you going?"

"Home."

"That's quite enough of that for now, I think," Eurus said, "Time for a new game. Look on the table in front of you."

Both Holmes brothers seemed disinclined to obey her, and Eurus commanded, "Open the envelope. If you want to speak to her again, earn yourself some phone time."

"This is insane!" Mycroft blurted.

"No shit, Mycroft," John said, exasperated with the man's continued inability to accept their situation. Sherlock, meanwhile, had taken an envelope off the table and shaken out three large photographs.

"Six months ago, a man called Evans was murdered; unsolved except by me. He was shot from a distance of three hundred metres with this rifle."

Above their heads, a spotlight illuminated an ancient-looking gun.

" _If_ the police had any brains they'd realise there are three suspects, all brothers. Nathan Garrideb, Alex Garrideb and Howard Garrideb. All these photos are up-to-date, but... which one pulled the trigger, Sherlock? Which one?"

"So… we've got to solve this based on?" John asked.

"What's here," Sherlock said absently.

"You may make use of your friends, too," Eurus allowed, "And you ought to. I want to see you interacting with them. You might not get the opportunity again."

Sherlock reached above his head and pulled down the rifle, and asked Mycroft, "What do you make of it?"

"I will not be manipulated like this."

"Fine. John."

Of course. John took the rifle from Sherlock and tried to do the hell version of the Antiques Roadshow.

"It's a buffalo rifle," he began, "Probably… 1940's, old-fashioned sight, no crosshairs. Not really a good weapon for target shooting at that range, more for stopping huge pissed-off animals. I had my marksman badge and I wouldn't expect to be able to make that shot with this gun."

Sherlock nodded.

"Glasses. Nathan wears glasses but at 300 meters they aren't going to enable him to do a precise shot. Not him then. Who's next?"

As Sherlock flipped over the first photo, Mycroft drawled sarcastically, "Well done, Doctor Watson. How  _useful_  you are. How handy, now that we're being made to compete."

John finally snapped.

"Fuck  _off,_  Mycroft. This isn't a bloody game. A man's dead, a plane's in the air about to crash, we are trying to save fucking lives. It's not a competition, it's happening."

Mycroft sighed.

"Your priorities do you credit, Doctor Watson, but-"

" _This_  is the hard part," John interrupted him, "When  _you're_ the one with the gun. Not sitting behind a desk, not reading a report. Out in the real world. Where you have to look them in the  _face_  and decide that."

"Oddly enough," Eurus chimed in, "Quite a timely remark. Now, as I understand it, Sherlock, you try to repress your emotions to refine your reasoning. I'd like to see how that works, so, if you don't mind, I'm going to apply some context to your deductions."

With that, three men, bound gagged and  _labeled_ , dropped down outside the window on ropes.

"Two of the Garridebs work here as orderlies, so getting the third along really wasn't too difficult. Once you bring in your verdict, let me know and justice will be done."

"Justice?" Sherlock asked.

"Early release."

"You'll drop them into the sea, you mean," Sherlock said drily.

"Sink, or swim," Eurus singsonged.

John turned away, repelled.

"Please, continue with your deductions. I'm just adding consequences at the moment."

Sherlock leaned heavily on the table. Then he looked out the window, fixing his observing gaze on the three men.

" _Not Nathan._ So… one of the others. Now, Howard, Howard's a lifelong drunk. Pallor of his skin, terminal gin blossoms on his red nose, and, terror notwithstanding… a bad case of the DTs. There's no way he could have taken that shot from three hundred metres away. So that leaves us with Alex. Indentations on the temples suggest he  _also_ habitually wears glasses. Frown lines suggest a lifetime of peering."

Sherlock was getting that enthusiastic rapid-fire speech that he did when he was working out the answer. Mycroft glanced out the window, and commented, "He's shortsighted, or he  _was_. His recent laser surgery has done the trick."

"Laser surgery?" Sherlock asked.

"Look at his clothes," Mycroft shrugged, "He's made an effort."

Sherlock smiled.

"Excellent. Suddenly he sees himself in quite a different light now that he's dumped the specs. Even has a spray tan. But he's clearly not used to his new personal grooming ritual. That can be told by the state of his fingernails and the fact that there's hair growing in his ears. So it's a superficial job, then. But he got his eyes fixed. His hands were steady.  _He_  pulled the trigger.  _He_  killed Evans."

Mycroft said suddenly, urgently, "Sherlock… you can't do this. You don't understand what it will do to you."

"It's the trolley problem, Mycroft. The plane, remember."

"Sher-lock," Eurus sang, "Are you ready to condemn the prisoner?"

Glancing over at John, Sherlock nodded once.

"Alex," he said simply.

"No, no," she answered, "You have to  _condemn_  him. You have to do it in the full and certain knowledge of what will happen when you do."

Sherlock walked to the window, and looked in the eyes of the bound man.

"I condemn Alex Garrideb."

As soon as he'd said it, Nathan and Howard's ropes were set loose. They made no sound that John could hear as they fell.

"Congratulations! You got the right one!" Eurus purred, "Now time for the next puzzle."

Sherlock had gone chalk white. Mycroft was rubbing his mouth, but presumably didn't have anything left to sick up.

"You dropped the other two…  _why?_ " John asked in horror.

She cocked her head and said, "Interesting. Does it really make a difference, killing the innocent instead of the guilty? Let's see."

She pressed a button, and Alex dropped with his brothers.

"No. That felt pretty much the same."

That was it. John was done. He walked to the window, trying to catch his breath. In the roiling sea below him there was no sign of the three brothers.

"John," Sherlock said urgently, "Don't let her distract you."

Whatever emotion he and Mycroft had been feeling, not ten seconds ago, was erased from their faces. John laughed disbelievingly and said, " _Distract_ me?"

"You're a soldier. You need to be that today."

John wished he had just a little bit more psychopath in his makeup. But he straightened his back, and put it aside. The three of them walked down a dim corridor, and over the speakers, the little girl began speaking again.

"I'm really frightened."

That actually made Sherlock visibly upset. But he just smiled, said, "It's okay, don't worry. I don't have very long with you, so I just need you to tell me what you can see outside the plane."

"Just the sea," she answered.

"Are there ships?"

"No ships. But I can see lights in the distance."

Sherlock looked at Mycroft in horror.

"A city?" he asked.

"I think so."

"She's about to fly over a city in a pilotless plane. We'll have to talk her through it," Mycroft said, slowly.

"Through what?" John said, with an awful suspicion in his mind that he already knew the answer.

"Hello? Are you still there?" the little girl asked.

"Still here. Just give us a minute," Sherlock said.

"We have to get her to bring the plane down, in the sea, away from populated areas. It has to crash."

"No," John uttered, horrified at the idea, "We can help her land it."

"We… we don't know how to fly a plane. And we don't have time to teach her how to use the radio," Sherlock said, hesitantly.

"And if she crashes into a city, how many will die? We have to…" Mycroft straightened his lapels.

"We have to give her hope."

Sherlock spoke more loudly, and more desperately, "Is there really no one there who can help you? Have you  _really_  checked?"

"Everyone's asleep. Will you help me?"

John could hear the tears in her voice, as she said, "I'm really scared."

They came into another room… smaller, narrower. On trestles, an open coffin.

Sherlock exhaled.

Over the speakers, Eurus announced, "And now… someone is about to die. As I understand it, it will be a  _tragic_  death. So many things left unsaid, so many joys left to experience."

She yawned.

"Yadda yadda."

"And this will be their coffin?" Sherlock asked.

"Mmm. But whose? That's the puzzle. You may begin. Context will be along momentarily."

Sherlock started, slowly at first, "It's… small. Likelier for a woman… or a child? No. A child gets white and lace and ephemera and above all, more money spent on it. This one's plain and inexpensive. But it's a very fine one for the low price bracket it is in, so an informed consumer."

Sherlock knew profoundly weird shit. John just was grateful they weren't dealing with another endangered child.

"So a small woman, and more likely, unmarried. No one in her life who might be inclined to choose the more costly casket on her behalf. Balance of probability suggests that this is for an unmarried woman distant from her close relatives. Acquainted with the process of death but unsentimental about the necessity of disposal. Also, the lining of the coffin-"

Mycroft had wandered off and was looking at the lid of the coffin where it stood propped on the wall.

" _Or_  we could look at the name on the lid," he interrupted, "Or what's where the name should be?"

The brass plate was inscribed, plainly, "I LOVE YOU."

"So, it's for somebody who loves somebody," John began, a growing sense of dread beginning to rise.

"It's for somebody who loves Sherlock. This is all about you. Everything here. So who loves you? I'm assuming it's not a long list," Mycroft said snidely.

"Christ, Molly," John breathed.

"It can't be her," Sherlock scoffed gently, "Molly's safe-"

But sure enough, another screen popped into life, and on it were four views of Molly's posh Islington flat.

Sherlock had gone very still, and in a forcibly calm voice he inquired of Mycroft, "Brother mine? Exactly why  _isn't_  Molly Hooper tucked up safe and sound playing cribbage with Mary, Rosie, and Mrs. Hudson?"

Mycroft had blanched, and he stammered, "Sherlock… I swear, I didn't know."

Sherlock looked about ready to explode but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by Eurus's merry, mad voice, saying, "Don't worry, she's perfectly safe, for the moment. But her flat  _is_  rigged to explode in approximately three minutes… unless I hear the release code from her lips. I'm calling her on your phone, Sherlock. Make her say it."

"Say what?" John asked.

"Obvious, isn't it?"

"Yes," Sherlock breathed, then turned away from the screen.

"I hope it goes without saying, but you're not allowed to mention in any way at all that her life is in danger. You may not – at any point – suggest that there is any form of crisis. If you do, I will end this session… and her life. Are we clear?"

The lights flashed to red, Jim whispered, "Tick, tock, tick, tock," and the phone began to ring.

In her kitchen, Molly looked up at the sound, and stepped over to her phone. John could see that she'd been crying, and she moved… stiffly, like she was in pain. She picked the mobile up, but then she made a face and set it down again when she saw the caller ID.

"What's she doing?" Sherlock asked, sounding… offended.

"She's making tea," Mycroft replied.

"Yes, but why isn't she answering her phone? It's  _me_  calling."

The clock had ticked away twenty seconds. John said, "Maybe we could try her from  _my_  phone?"

The phone rang over to voicemail, and Molly's nerdy memo, "Hi, this is Molly, at the dead center of town. Leave a message," played.

From the speakers, Eurus said soothingly, "Okay, okay. We'll give her one more try."

The phone began ringing again. On the screen, Molly rolled her eyes, set down her tea cup, and picked up.

"Sherlock, is this important? Because I'm really not in the mood just now."

John had literally never heard Molly being snappish, before. Sherlock clearly had, and began, "Molly, hi. I just want you to do something very easy for me, and not ask why."

"Oh, God. Is this another one of your stupid games?"

"No, it's not a game. I ... need your help."

Molly looked concerned, and said, "Well, I'm not at the lab."

"Not like that."

Molly tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder, started slicing a lemon, and asked, "Okay… what?"

"Molly, please, without asking why, I need you to say… "

He took a deep breath.

"I need you to say, 'I love you.'"

Which was possibly the stupidest way to go about this that John could think of. Molly clearly agreed with him, because she folded her lips, dropped the knife, and was making to hang up until Sherlock begged her, "Molly, no, please,  _please_  don't hang up."

"Calmly, Sherlock," Eurus said, "Or I will finish her now."

The clock was down to a minute thirty, and Molly hissed, "How c-can you do this to me? After- after  _e-e-everything_. Everything that I have  _ever_  done for you-

"Please, I swear, you just have to listen to me."

Sherlock looked at John and Mycroft helplessly, then slapped a huge, fake smile on his face to try and make his voice gentler when he spoke.

"Molly, it's for a case!"

"Oh, it's  _always_  for a case, isn't it?" Molly spat bitterly, "Shoot up, fake an engagement, sleep with your  _friend_. What case justifies doing  _this..._  to  _me?_ "

"Molly," Sherlock hesitated, "I can't say why, but… it's  _very_  important. I promise you. I wouldn't ask it if it wasn't."

"I...I can't say that. I can't say that to  _you_."

"Of  _course_  you can.  _Why_  can't you?" Sherlock said, still smiling, still trying to make his voice gentle.

"You  _know_  why, you bastard."

Sherlock tilted his head in confusion, "No, I don't know. Why?"

"Of course you do. Because-"

Molly's face crumpled, and she started to cry.

"B-because it's  _true_."

Sherlock was very still, wide eyed and solemn. He  _hadn't_  known.

"It's  _always_ been true. And you  _never_ …"

Sherlock pressed his hands into his forehead, hard enough to hurt. Then he straightened up, and said, "If it's true, just say it anyway."

Molly laughed softly, and a faint smile crossed her lips.

"No."

"Molly,  _please_ ," Sherlock begged.

"If it's so easy,  _you_  say it. Say it and make me think you mean it," she said. John had never seen this side of her before. He liked her, obviously, she'd been a rock when Mary was in hospital… but she'd always seemed like a helpless kitten in the face of the steamroller of Sherlock's personality. But now she'd found the hill she was willing to die on… all too literally.

"Thirty seconds," Eurus murmured.

"I… I-" Sherlock stammered. John looked away, wishing he could be anywhere else than having to witness this. It was like seeing Sherlock naked… well, it would be, if seeing Sherlock naked wasn't a routine part of life as his flatmate.

It was like seeing Sherlock cut open.

"I love you."

Sherlock blurted it out. Then he thought about it for a moment, and said, softer and slower, "I… love you."

Molly's eyes were closed, tears raining down her cheeks.

"Molly?" Sherlock asked, "Molly, please…"

Molly wiped the back of her hand over her mouth.

So quietly she could barely be heard, Molly murmured, "I love you."

The clock ran out. And the cameras went to black.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Given this chapter has a TON of material harvested from "The Final Problem," I probably ought to use this opportunity to thank arianedevere over at dreamwidth again. Her excellent, detailed transcripts are an incredible resource for someone who chuckleheadedly decided to rewrite an entire season of this show.


	16. Brothers

There was a moment of absolute silence. Sherlock broke it, saying, "Put the cameras back on."

"That game is over, Sherlock. And you won! She said it," Eurus said quietly, reappearing on the screen.

"I don't  _care_  what she said, I want you to put the cameras  _back on_ ," Sherlock  _growled_ , glaring at his sister, his hands folded into fists.

"Ohhh,  _Sherlock_ ," Eurus sighed, "You're really not getting-"

"No,  _stop it_ , Eurus," Sherlock interrupted her, "This  _isn't_  a game anymore. We did what you wanted, John saved the governor's wife,  _I_ saved Molly Hooper, so put the cameras back on and let me see her, you bloody-minded  _bitch_."

His voice cracked on the last word.

"Sherlock, I'm not going to do that." Eurus's voice was curiously gentle, as if she were explaining something complicated to a little child.

"Because you won't, or because you  _can't_?"

 _God,_  John thought. Molly, that quiet gentle little woman,  _dead_ , never again to kiss Rosie's chubby cheeks or laugh at her own geeky mortuary jokes or drag Sherlock so subtly he never noticed it was happening. It seemed impossible, a creeping horror at the edge of things.

"It doesn't matter whether I won't or can't, Sherlock, that's the whole  _point_ ," Eurus said exasperatedly, "Because Molly Hooper  _doesn't matter_."

Sherlock's hands, the gun dangling from one, were hanging limply at his sides, and he stared mutely at the video monitor.

"Whether she's currently staring at her mobile and cursing your name or lying scattered over a city block of central London,  _it doesn't matter_. Dead, not dead… really, what difference would it make? There's a shortage of qualified younger pathologists at the moment, but Barts is prestigious and well-funded, they could get by until she was replaced. The Watsons would have to find a new reliable childminder, her mother might have to drag herself out of her narcissist daze long enough to buy another black dress… my God, it'd barely even matter to  _Molly._ "

The three men stared up at Eurus, declaiming on the screen.

"But oh,  _you_ , Sherlock… it matters to  _you_. All these hidden little emotions. They get you every time."

"I… I saved her," Sherlock murmured.

"Did you?" Eurus asked, "Funny. I thought you'd learned the difference between facts and beliefs by now. I suppose you'll have to wait and wonder. Now, please, pull yourself together, I need you at peak efficiency. The next one isn't going to be so easy. Please go through."

Another door slid open in the wall, and John turned to look through it, only to have his attention drawn back by the noisy clatter of the gun hitting the ground. Sherlock had dropped it, and sunk to the floor, wrapping his long arms around himself and resting his chin on his knees.

John glanced at Mycroft in alarm, and the two of them hurried over to Sherlock, who looked up at John with vacant blue eyes. Christ, this was bad.

"John, I…" Sherlock began, before trailing off.

"Sherlock-" John started, not knowing what to say to help.

"What… I mean, what  _if_  Molly's dead? Because Eurus let Mrs. Iqbal loose but she dropped  _all_  the Garridebs and I can't predict her behaviors clearly and I didn't know, John,  _I didn't know_  and if it's too late and I couldn't save her-" Sherlock spoke rapidly, but barely above a whisper.

John sighed, and knelt on the floor next to Sherlock. Carefully, mindful of the normal touch aversion, he wrapped an arm around the younger man's shaking shoulders and held on to him tightly. Mrs. Hudson had done this for him, he remembered, on the afternoon Mary had gone back in to her second emergency surgery and nothing in the world seemed safe or certain.

Above them, Mycroft, grey faced and bleak, said, "Sherlock, if Doctor Hooper has been… harmed… the responsibility is mine, not yours. I have mismanaged this terribly." For a moment, John could see quite clearly what he would look like as an old man.

John took a deep breath.

"If Molly's- If Molly  _is_  gone, you'll keep putting one foot ahead of the other. The world doesn't grind to a halt just because one person drops out of it. And it'll be… hell, absolute hell, but you'll get through it.  _That's_  what happens. And if she's all right, then-"

He shrugged.

"That might actually be a bit scarier for you, come to think of it. Though you've got  _no idea_  how good it is. But for right now, I'm sorry, Sherlock, we  _have_ to keep going. We've got to save that plane."

Sherlock buried his face in his knees for a moment. When he raised his head again, his eyes were clear and his jaw was set. Unfolding his long legs, he rose to his feet, picked up the gun, and straightened his lapels.

"Onward," he said, grimly.

The next room was empty, with video monitors on all four walls showing nothing but running water. The door slid shut behind them as Sherlock asked in a high hectic tone, "Hey, sis, don't mean to complain but this one's empty. What happened? Did you run out of ideas?"

"It's not empty, Sherlock," Eurus appeared on one monitor, smiling sweetly, "You've still got the gun, haven't you? I  _told_  you you'd need it, because only two can play the next game. Just two of you go on from here; your choice. It's make-your-mind-up time. Whose help do you need the most to solve the case – John or Mycroft?"

Sherlock looked at John and his brother, and at the gun in his hand.

"It's an elimination round. You choose one and kill the other. You have to choose... family, or friend. Mycroft, or John Watson?"

The lights went red. Jim Moriarty tick-tocked at them.

And John knew, with a bitter certainty, what he had to do.

"Sherlock… oh. Oh fuck. It has to be me, doesn't it?"

The invisible blogger, the one who gets things explained to him, the one who saves lives but can't solve  _puzzles_. Now he was going to have to actually live up to the hero title, and he  _hated_  it. Sherlock said hesitantly, "John, I-"

"No, Sherlock, it's- it's okay," though of course it wasn't, Sherlock would never be okay after this, "It's all right. I understand. Once this is over and done with, I'll want you to help Mary, all right? By which I mean… give her money if she needs it, and help her look after Rosie,  _nothing_ more exotic. Just to be clear. And tell her and Rosie-"

"Tell them yourself, Doctor Watson," Mycroft interrupted John, crooking a faint smile.

They both looked at the British government, standing ramrod-straight in the center of the room. The older man scoffed lightly.

"It's only logical. Doctor Watson is your assistant, not me. And you are perfectly capable of solving this mystery, with or without my help. I have, and have always had, every faith in you, Sherlock."

"That's the choice Jim thought you would make," Eurus said softly, "It's why he didn't put snipers on our dear brother."

"This… has been  _my fault_. I allowed Eurus to be incarcerated here, and I failed to ensure her security. I didn't notice the importance of Doctor Hooper to you and therefore I didn't place her under my protection. And as you've undoubtedly guessed already, I allowed our sister to meet with James Moriarty."

He shrugged one shoulder.

"A Christmas treat. Unsupervised conversation with him, only for five minutes, as a reward for her continued cooperation. That's what set all this into play. My life is a fair price to pay for my failure."

Sherlock was looking between John and Mycroft, the gun still aimed at the floor. Then he took a deep breath and asked, "John? Do- do you remember that film you made me watch? The Star Trek?"

John smiled, wistfully, remembering that quiet Sunday afternoon in Baker Street, with tea and his DVD collection and a cranky, recuperating-from-a-gunshot-wound detective.

"Yeah. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. It's okay."

"Sherlock, he has a  _young family_ ," Mycroft said urgently, "Your goddaughter, Rosamund, who nearly lost her mother less than three months ago. You cannot choose him."

"What?" Sherlock asked petulantly, "No, not that Star Trek. That one was rubbish. My God, is this what it's like being the sane one? No wonder you two are so tetchy all the time."

He smiled, a deadly wolfish smile without an ounce of humor in it.

"I'm talking about the first one, with the  _Kobayashi Maru_. When presented with a game in which there's no possibility of a victory…"

He raised the gun and tucked the barrel under his own jaw, and said, "You  _cheat_. Ten. Nine-"

"Sherlock do NOT," Mycroft shouted.

"You can't do that," Eurus cried anxiously.

"Oh,  _try me,_ sis. What do I have to lose? Eight. Seven-" Sherlock sing-songed at her.

"You don't know about Redbeard yet!"

"Don't know, don't care. Six,  _five-_ "

"Stop that at once!" Eurus was shouting.

When Sherlock got to four, he raised his free hand to his neck, and started to wobble. By two he had sunk to his knees, and the gun had fallen. John barely noticed the small sting of the tranquilizer dart in his own shoulder.

The three of them went into the darkness together, accompanied by the sound of falling water.


	17. Water

He floated, all alone. It was comfortable and safe. Then in the dark he heard a little girl crying, somewhere far away, and John woke up.

This time there was no double vision. There was no vision at all, and for a horrified moment John thought that he'd gone blind. But then his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and when he waved a hand in front of his face, he could see a pale blur.

"Are you there yet?" Sherlock's voice, echoing and crackling, came from a speaker somewhere in the unseen void above his head. As his other senses came back online, John realized he was sitting in shallow, icy water, and lurched to his feet.

"Yeah, I'm here," he gasped.

"John!" Sherlock exclaimed, "Where are you?"

A very good question, to which John would also like to know the answer.

"I'm not sure… I just woke up. It's dark. Where are you?"

"Another cell. We've been unconscious for hours. I just was talking to the girl on the plane."

"She's… she's still up there?" John asked, groping around. His hands touched a stone wall.

"The plane will keep flying until it runs out of fuel," Sherlock said shortly. Which… John didn't know much about flying, but surely a large plane going missing for  _hours_  would have provoked some sort of official response, in this day and age? Post September 11? He was about to say as much when Sherlock asked, "Is Mycroft there with you?"

"I… I can't tell. It's dark."

He called for Mycroft, but heard nothing back but the flat echoes of his own voice in a small space.

"I don't think so."

There was a silence, then Sherlock said, "I  _see_. Tell me about your location."

It was like being in Baskerville all over again. John took a step forward, shuffling over rough, water-soaked floors with one hand on the wall, the other thrust blindly out in front of him.

"The walls are… stone. Rough stones, the size of bricks. I think the floor is too but I'm about knee-deep in water here, Sherlock."

One more step and his numbed foot was jerked to a halt. John knelt down and dipped his hands into the freezing water to feel a smooth cuff around his ankle.

He exhaled.

"And I'm chained up. Left foot."

John traced his hands along the thick chain, following the short length back to where it was fastened into the stone floor through a thick bolt. He wrapped his freezing fingers around it and tugged with all his strength, but could feel no movement, no shift in the connection at all.

Something floating bumped up against his hand and after pushing back a moment of absolute screaming horror, John reached out and picked it up.

"There's… something floating in here. Light. Smooth."

 _Like ivory,_  he thought. Or…

"There are bones in here."

Sherlock hesitated, then asked, "What kind of bones?"

John ran a hand over the object he couldn't see properly. Long, and straight, a rounded articulation point at one end, an indented facet on the other…  _femur,_  the medical student who still lived in his brain whispered.

"Um. Small ones. I'm not… quite sure."

Though even then, even in the dark, even with his hands going numb, he sort of suspected.

"Redbeard…" Sherlock murmured through the speakers. Then louder and with a false cheeriness, he said, "Oh, hallo, are you at the front of the plane now?"

Whatever was said in reply, John didn't hear. As Sherlock tried to convince the girl (and himself) that they could land the plane correctly, John groped blindly in the darkness for more… more information, whatever that might be.

There were more bones, and John cursed the fact that he couldn't see, because doing this with his hands alone made identification of the smaller ones impossible. But surely everything that walked had to have a femur, right? And he didn't know much about dogs, but Irish Setters were pretty good sized ones, he thought, and they might very well have long legs and long bones.

A shaft of light pierced the inky darkness around him, and John craned his head up to look for its source. High above his head, through a gap in two boards, he could just see clouds scudding over the face of the moon, before it was hidden again behind them. The cold pale light illuminated a circular stone void, and then John knew.

Sherlock was saying, "It'll be dead easy, I've got a cousin who flies planes and he's an idiot, so really anyone can do it, we've just got to figure out how to work the radio."

"Sherlock," John said.

"Yes?"

"I'm down at the bottom of a well. That's where she's put me."

John could picture the irritated fron on Sherlock's face as he said, "It's... it's a tiny rock island. Where would they dig a well in Sherrinford? And more to the point, where am  _I?_  Why is there a draft?"

Over the speakers, John heard a loud bang, and Sherlock's satisfied, "Ah. I'm home. This is Musgrave Hall."

There was another gap in the audio, and then John heard Sherlock's breathless, "Yeah, it's just an old burnt-out building, I don't  _care,_  Eurus, let me talk to the girl on the plane."

Another pause, and "Redbeard's been dead for thirty years, Eurus."

Somewhere above John, there was a groaning sound, like elderly pipes. Water began cascading down the walls of the well, and John fought down panic to call, "Sherlock?"

No response. John shouted, then, "SHERLOCK!"

"I'm here, John," Sherlock said, out of breath.

"There's water coming in. The well is flooding."

"Gotcha. Try not to drown."

John resisted the urge to tell him to go fuck himself, and ran his hands over the wall, looking for handholds to lift himself up towards safety.

"Eurus," Sherlock pleaded, "You said the answer's in the song, but I went through the song, line by line, when I was a boy. There was a beech tree in the grounds and I dug. I dug  _everywhere,_  sixteen feet by six, sixteen yards, sixteen meters. There was nothing."

John lost his grip on the slippery rocks and fell back into the water. He plunged all the way in, and the palm of his hand skidded on something smooth and rounded. He stood up, the water now up to his crotch, and then dipped back under to find what he had touched.

_Oh._

Skulls had always seemed small to him, when he'd been a student. Without flesh, without hair, they seemed disproportionately tiny and fragile. But what he had in his hands was…  _very_  small. Old bones, yes. But from a young body.

"Sherlock," John said, slowly, "There's something you need to know. The bones I found-"

"Yes," Sherlock replied distractedly, "They're dog's bones. Redbeard's bones."

"No, they're not. You must have forgotten somehow, with the rest of it. And Mycroft kept up the lie."

There was silence, as Sherlock listened to whatever Eurus was saying, and then, stammering, he murmured, "Father's deathly allergic to dogs. I begged, but all we could have were cats. And goldfish.

"Oh, God. Victor. Victor Trevor. We played pirates. Sherlock… means fair-haired. So I was Yellowbeard, and he…"

"Oh, Eurus," Sherlock said mournfully, "What have you done? You killed my best friend."

"Sherlock, she's going to do it again," John shouted, "The water's still rising."

It was up to his waist already, creeping ever higher. On the speaker, Sherlock said, more strongly, "Okay. Okay, let's play."

John tried another go at his chains, which were as immovably fixed as ever. When he came back to the surface again, Sherlock was shouting, "I'm trying to solve a puzzle, and the puzzle will save the plane. The wrong dates, that's the key. She used the wrong dates on the gravestones as a key to the cipher, and the cipher was the song."

"Sherlock," John shouted over the thunder of the water, "Is this strictly relevant?"

"Yes, shut up John, I'll be with you in a moment, I'm  _working_."

Sherlock was panting now. Was he running?

"Let's number the words of the song, then rearrange the numbered words to match the sequence on the gravestones," Sherlock said in a high rapid voice.

"I… am… lost," he began. But then the water filled John's ears and he couldn't hear what happened next.

* * *

_So this is how John Watson dies_. Not bleeding out in the Khyber Pass, not blown up in a swimming pool, not shot to death by his best friend… drowning, alone in the dark, with the bones of a murdered child floating around him.

Any of the others might have been preferable, he thinks, though it's the strangely calm thought process he remembers from the other times.

He's swimming and the chains, though they can't objectively weigh that much, keep tugging him down. This is the difference between density and weight, he thinks. There's an element of abstract interest in the idea of whether the water will rise above where his short tether allows him to go, or if he'll get exhausted first and give up.

He wonders, in these last moments, of what will happen after, in the world that he's dropped out of. If Mary will cry over him, grieve him, wonder what might have been if they'd had a little more time. If Rosie will remember the father she only knew for the first months of her life, or if "Dad" will just be photographs and stories told to her. If Sherlock will solve the case and find him, or if his body will stay down here, in the dark with Victor, forever.

_Please, God, let me live._

He can't hear Sherlock any more. He can't hear anything over the roar of the incoming water. It's going to end here, and it's going to end soon, and John's  _not ready_ , not yet.

There's water in his nose, in his mouth, despite all his best efforts.

And then, just at the last moment, when John is going to have to take a breath and let his lungs fill up… there's a miracle. The water stops flowing, and the light of salvation shines down on his face.


	18. Safehouse

John was alive. Molly was alive, thank God. Even Mycroft was alive, which… oh, probably someone would miss him if he were dead.

Molly had gotten in touch with Greg after that phone call, wondering what the hell was going on, so Sherlock was taken back to London to find her at his  _aggressive_  insistence. But the safehouse where Mary and Rosie were staying wasn't all that far away from Musgrave Hall as the crow flew and so John decided to go with Lestrade and Mycroft there, riding silently in the back of a black open-topped jeep.

He really should have changed out of his wringing wet clothes before he did this. By the time they arrived, the cold of the icy well water had sunk down into his bones.

Somehow, after the day, John was expecting the safehouse to be another crumbling Gothic monstrosity or brutalist prison, but it wasn't. It was a largish, ugly, Mock-Tudor house in an upscale Sussex housing development, only remarkable for the enormous secret service agent guarding the door.

John exhaled in relief. He was back in the land of the grownups.

Mycroft got them the nod to go in, John stumbled through the door, and there, safe and comfortable, was his family. Rosie was out for the count, asleep on a blanket on the floor in that weird way she liked now: thumb in mouth, face planted, legs tucked beneath her, diaper-clad rump in air. And Mary…

Mary's hair wasn't mad and spiny, so she hadn't been sleeping, but she  _was_  wearing a borrowed pair of men's satin pajamas. She was  _swimming_  in them. She'd folded six inches of cuff into the trousers, and the sleeves fell down to completely cover her hands. As she listened, wide eyed and solemn, to Mycroft telling her the story, she pushed the left one up absently. Then John could see that she was  _also_  carrying a gun.

He'd thought she'd got rid of her gun after she'd shot Sherlock. She'd said so. But he supposed one more deception added to the great pile that the two of them had assembled didn't really amount to much in the end.

"I  _did_  get rid of my gun," Mary said, looking at him curiously, "But I feel better when I have one so I borrowed this one from the Goon Show outside, just… you know, just in case. John, what's wrong with you?"

He must have said that out loud. John had to think about it for a minute, since he felt… drunk. Odd. Distantly he could hear Greg asking, "Wait, she bloody  _what_?"

"I was in a well!" John said finally.

Mary's eyes widened, she made the gun safe and handed it to Greg, then took three steps over to John. She touched his hands, laid a warm palm on his forehead, pulled the blanket off his shoulders to see his shivers, and exclaimed, "Christ, you're freezing. He's got hypothermia, he should be in  _hospital_!"

Her second sentence was angry and directed at Mycroft and Greg, and she followed it up with an urgent, "Help me get him into the bath, quick now."

John had never felt so short as when he had one arm over the respective shoulders of Mycroft Holmes and Greg Lestrade, being half-carried down the hallway to the bathroom. The room was peak 1980s, all glaring lights and chrome and glass blocks and an enormous black marble jacuzzi. At Mary's terse instructions the other two men deposited John in a heap in the tub.

"Out," she snapped, "And mind the baby."

Then she started the water running, and John hissed in pain, "That's way too hot."

"I promise it's not, it's barely warm. The circulation's coming back to your skin, it'll stop hurting in a minute. Move about if you can, it'll make it go faster."

She pulled one of his shoes off, then tried to reach over to do the far one. This tugged at her wounds, and she winced at the pain of stretching and climbed in the tub with him instead. Kneeling between his legs, Mary unbuttoned his shirt, and said coaxingly, "Now no nodding off, okay, John? I need you to keep talking, keep awake."

John thought muzzily about it, then cocked an eyebrow and purred in the sexy low voice that always did it for her, "You know body heat would work for this too."

Mary stopped dead and gave him the single best facial expression he'd ever seen.

" _Seriously_?"

"Look, you drag me into a bathroom that I'm damn sure I've seen in a porn and start ripping my clothes off, what am I s'posed to think?"John slurred.

"My God, is that actually  _taught_  as part of basic training? Literally every man I've ever met from the Army can't resist trying it on. No matter how inappropriate the occasion."

"' _Death or Glory_ ,' Morstan. Death or Glory."

Mary actually chuckled a bit at that, which was nice. With his uncoordinated help, she undressed him down to his boxers, as efficiently and unsentimentally as she would do to Rosie. Then she sat on the edge of the tub for a minute to catch her breath and have a cough, saying something about how she missed having functional lungs, before climbing out.

Her borrowed pajamas were soaked, so she pulled them off. John looked, when she did. He was always going to be the sort of man who looked, he hadn't seen Mary with her clothes off since Morocco, and who knew when he'd get the opportunity again? So he looked.

She was skinny, where before she had been slim. He could see the bones of her spine, and her pants were too big for her. The thoracotomy incision, still red but healing now, curved from below her shoulder blade, around her ribs, almost to her sternum.

The bullet wound, by contrast, was an unremarkable divot in the smooth slope of one breast. Such a small thing, to do so much harm.

Just then Mary saw him looking, blushed, and tugged a towel off the rack.

"It's ugly, I know," she said lightly, wrapping the towel round, covering up her scars and herself, "I'm thinking when it's all healed up I might get another tattoo to hide it… like a climbing rose or an ivy or something."

Internally, John cringed. He  _hated_ tattoos, especially on women. The one she already had would rather have put him off if it were somewhere he could have seen it before being  _very_  invested in proceeding. But he had absolutely no right to comment at this point, so he contented himself with, "It's not as bad as you think. Becker did a good job. Once the redness is gone it'll be a lot better looking than my shoulder."

Mary scoffed, "That's different."

"Why?"

"You're a  _man_."

She sat on the edge of the bath and tested the temperature of the water. When it had filled up to the level of John's shoulders, she switched the flow off, and he floated in the quiet warmth.

"I admire the hell out of that about you, you know," he said, accompanied by the drip of the tap.

Mary glanced down at her rather deflated cleavage and raised an eyebrow.

"No, not the breasts, though full marks there, obviously. The personality. When somebody needs you… you just put everything else aside, and deal with it."

"Oh. Thank you, I guess."

"Though you do it at other times too. And speaking as the thing that you mostly put aside, it can kind of suck."

"I don't think that that's what I do," Mary objected, though she sounded… doubtful.

"Yeahhhh, you do. It's okay though. It makes a lot of sense."

Mary leaned her head back on the tiles of the tub enclosure and exhaled. Then she looked him square in the eye, and began, "Hypothermia as truth serum, who'd have thought. All right, John. I'd like to ask you some questions, and believe me when I say that I  _will_  know if you lie."

"Shoot," John replied grandly, leaning his head back on the edge of the tub, "Though please not literally."

"I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you aren't  _now_ , what with all the torture and child murder, but… when you were texting her, were you  _in love_  with Eurus Holmes?"

That was an easy one.

"No. It wasn't about that."

"So, what  _was_  it about, then? Are you just… unhappy?"

That was tougher, even if his brain had been firing on all cylinders. Finally he said, "I wouldn't say unhappy. But it was- an adventure. In a life where I'd suddenly transformed into a dull middle-aged suburban GP with profound opinions about brands of nappy cream."

Mary smiled sadly.

"I rather liked that dull middle-aged suburban GP."

"It's not like I think it reflects well upon me. But the man I want to be and the man I actually  _am_ … they really are fairly far apart."

"I can certainly sympathize with that.. though I'd like to point out that as wives go, I do  _technically_  count as something of an adventure. Just in and of myself."

John snorted.

"Yeah, well, it wasn't the brightest thing I ever did, expecting you to be ordinary and then not liking it when you were. But that's what I did."

He hesitated.

"I never wanted to hurt you. But I know I did. I wish I hadn't. I'm sorry."

Mary crooked a half smile at that.

"If we're clearing our consciences, then I suppose I can mention that I  _am_ aware that I should have told you about my past at some point before you found it out on your own. And I shouldn't have shot Sherlock. I apologized to him, but… I never really did to you, did I?"

"No, not really."

"I'm sorry, then. Truly. Probably didn't do the old trust issues much good, did it?"

"No it did  _not_ ," John agreed dryly.

She tested the temperature of the water, then asked, very quietly, "Did you sleep with her?"

Another easy one.

"Nope."

And thank fuck for that. One of the few pieces of fatherly advice the Old Major had ever seen fit to give him, along with "You know that wheel games are for suckers, right lad?" had been "Never put it up the crazy, Johnny." And John admittedly preferred to play  _cards_ , but otherwise he'd ignored those helpful tips, example 1A being sat on the edge of the tub. He'd only been saved by blind luck from this situation being even worse.

"Did you want to?" Mary asked.

John sighed.

"Yes. Kind of."

She nodded at that, quite calmly, and asked, "But were you  _going_  to?"

And at that he had to stew and finally say, "Maybe. I truly don't know. I wasn't  _planning_ on it… but I don't know if I wouldn't have. Had it become an option."

Mary's mouth twisted up, then she nodded again, and added a bit more hot water to the tub. But she honestly still wasn't trying to boil him, so it was just a bit.

Then she said, "Now here's the big one. If you could do it without… without guilt, or anger, or recrimination… if you could go and live in Baker Street and solve crimes with Sherlock and defend England from her foes and be  _single_. Is that what you'd want to do?"

"No."

Just one word.

"Please, no."

Well, two.

Mary was speaking slowly, as if she was inventing the words just before she was saying them, "Because right here and now, if that's what we  _need_  to do, I think we can do it with the absolute minimum amount of harm. Rosie's… she's still so little that the  _status_  becomes  _quo_  for her very quickly, and she'd adapt to alternating nights and weekends and it'd just be, 'Oh, yeah, my mum and dad split up when I was a baby.'"

"It's nothing to do with Rosie. It's to do with  _you_."

"I'm not going to put up with a man who runs around on me. I know…" Mary wrang her hands together in her lap, "I know I'm not really a good person. But I've thought about it and even so it doesn't mean I'm obligated to put up with that. So I'm not going to."

"I don't expect you to."

"There's always going to be pretty women on the bus," Mary mused, sounding as if she was talking to herself, "They come out with new ones every year."

Mary sat silently. John soaked. Then he volunteered, "Mind you, even if you do end up dumping me I can't move back in to Baker Street. I'd have to find a new place."

"Why's that?"

"Because Sherlock and Molly are going to need to shag for about six months straight to get it all out of their systems. They won't want a third wheel hanging about."

Mary wrinkled her nose and asked, "Those two? Really?"

"Yeah, that's happened. I mean, it  _was_  awful, she might just stab him instead, but… yeah, I think that happened."

"Huh. I guess that's… that's quite nice, actually."

She smiled faintly, and let a breath out.

"Okay."

"Okay?" John asked.

Mary chuckled and said, "Well, no, it's not okay, I don't know why I said that, nothing's okay. You may not have noticed, John, but everything for the last several months has just been  _really_  confusing and shitty."

She reached into the tub, took up his water-wrinkled hand, and entwined their fingers together.

"But it  _is_  something that I'm prepared to work with."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't generally like to call out my own inaccuracies which I insert in the name of dramatic effect, but while a warm (not hot) tub is a very classic and effective treatment for rewarming victims of hypothermia it also comes with some serious risks, including cardiac arrest and death. Should you find yourself in this situation IRL, call for professional help.
> 
> "Death or Glory" is technically a cavalry regiment's motto in the British Army. John, in the RAMC, would have had "Faithful in Adversity" instead, which is too cheaply on-the-nose for even me to use.
> 
> I borrowed the bit where Doctor Watson, in the original "Sign of Four," admired how Miss Morstan could put her own troubles aside in the cause of helping someone else.
> 
> In my experience it's really mostly Navy dudes, not Army, who are 100% keen for amorous encounters all the time. Possibly because worse things happen at sea. Dramatic effect again.
> 
> There's one final chapter to do.


	19. Montage

Greg Lestrade sat in an MI6 safehouse in Sussex and minded the sleeping baby, as he'd been instructed. She was totally unconcerned by all of the adventure going on around her, and he remembered when his own kids, now almost grown, were this age. Once they'd gone all floppy like that you could pretty much fold them in half and put them into a sack while singing, "Rule, Britannia!" and they still wouldn't waken.

_What a family,_  he thought. Mummy, apparently formerly one of the most dangerous intelligence agents in the world, who shot godfather Sherlock, who shot Charles Magnussen, which crime had been concealed in defiance of all law or justice by Uncle British Government (who had related all these facts before going comatose and snoring on the sofa). Greg was also starting to suspect that he didn't have all the facts in regard to her Dad and the shooting of Jefferson Hope. These lot were far too fond of guns.

Then, of course, back in London, there was Granny Tony Montana, and godmother fiancé-stabbing death-certificate forger Molly Hooper. And you couldn't forget loony mass murderer Auntie Eurus, now.

"Poor little mite," Greg muttered, "You don't stand a chance."

Right then, Greg made an oath, none the less true and sincere for its never being spoken aloud. From that moment, Rosie had a fourth unofficial godparent, who was determined that she would, despite all odds, grow up to be  _sane_.

She did. Twenty years and a bit after that night, Rosie Watson finished her degree in criminal justice, passed her CPK, took an oath of her own and began training as a proper copper in the Metropolitan Police Service. By then Greg had passed compulsory retirement age, but he sat right down front at her enlistment ceremony, wearing his own full-dress uniform and nearly bursting with pride.

Her mum and dad were also very proud, though slightly… confused that she'd taken so thoroughly to the side of law and order. And Sherlock acted disgusted at this development but everyone could tell he was secretly pleased.

* * *

London wrapped her comforting arms around him. Every building, every alley and corner they passed told him its secrets as clearly as print. Sherlock hastened to the street where Molly lived, to find it blockaded off by what looked like the entirety of the Metropolitan police force. He ducked beneath the crime scene tape, dodging a uniformed constable who tried to stop him, when a familiar but wholly unwelcome voice shouted out, "Oi! Holmes!"

Sherlock grimaced, and then pasted on a false smile to say, "Detective Inspector Donovan, what a  _pleasure_!"

Sally folded her arms across her chest and looked up at him with her normal flat-eyed glare.

"What brings you here, Holmes? Because if it's for the crime scene you can piss off. It's police business and you're an  _amateur_."

"It's-"

"And if it's for  _Molly_ ," she interrupted him, "Then she's sitting in the back of that ambulance you just walked past."

Sherlock hesitated. Donovan rolled her eyes and said, "Go on then. Dickhead," before turning back to her work.

Molly had changed, at some point, into pajamas. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, and her horrible cat was sitting in her lap. Toby put his ears back and went "Rrr" when he saw Sherlock.

She'd obviously been crying, but she smiled a watery smile when she saw Sherlock and said, making air quotes with the hand that wasn't petting Toby, "'Definitely cameras and possibly explosives.' It's all go with you, isn't it? Really never a dull moment."

"Molly-" Sherlock began.

" _Sherlock_ ," Molly said, "It's okay. Really. We…"

She laughed grimly, " _I_  got it out of my system. Just like you did when you were high and came over to my flat. So it doesn't have to be the enormous pathetic elephant in the room anymore. I'm sorry I made you lie to me, I know that you try not to do that anymore. And I will be okay with it and be a good sport and not make any fuss… tomorrow. I will do all that tomorrow."

There was an air of finality and "Piss off, Sherlock," about her statement.

"Yes, fine, Molly," Sherlock snapped, "But the thing is I didn't lie."

Molly blinked up at him.

"I didn't realize it. Nobody did, until my sister… did they tell you about her yet? She's called Eurus, and she's the smart one in the family. You may actually have met her, she leads quite an active social life for someone nominally in prison, I'll have to look into that. Mad, though. Very very mad. There have been several horrifying deaths.  _No_  idea what I'm going to do about that."

He was babbling. So he cleared his throat and folded his hands behind his back.

"She realized what I felt when I didn't know it myself. That's why she made me call you, because she knew what my feelings would do to  _me_. And I don't know if I would have said it, otherwise, but I didn't lie. Every word was true."

Molly was staring at him, and Sherlock continued, "There's no obligation imposed upon you because of it. I have… neglected, and mistreated, and ignored you. I owe you everything, and you would be entirely in your rights to never speak to me again. When you popped up on the screens and I saw that you had been crying I knew I'd already hurt you  _again,_  and I regretted every minute of that call for making it worse. Regardless, it seems important that you know, it was true. It  _is_  true. And I suppose it always will be."

Molly opened her mouth, then closed it again. Sherlock crammed his hands into his pockets, and said, "Anyway, that was all. Thank you for your attention, yours sincerely, Sherlock Holmes."

He turned away, making the first of several million disbelieving lifetime repetitions of the phrase " _Yours Sincerely, Sherlock Holmes,_ " when Molly called, "Sherlock, get back here."

He did, and Molly scooted over on the gurney and pointed to the spot next to her.

"Sit down," she ordered. He climbed in, and did. Molly sat next to him, a small solid pressure along his right arm and thigh. Toby showed his displeasure at Sherlock's nearness by stalking off and staring intensely into the corner of the ambulance.

"I'm crying  _now_  because of you. But when you  _called_  me, I was crying because of  _this,_ " she began, gesturing at her left leg, which Sherlock noticed now was encased to the knee in a stabilizing boot.

"When did that happen?" he asked confusedly.

"Yesterday morning," Molly said, "Did you really miss that?"

"I was watching your face," he said defensively.

"I was prepping for a post-mortem and dropped the reciprocating saw right on top of my foot. Broke two of my metatarsals," she said, sighing, "It  _really_  hurts.  _And_  I left my painkillers in my flat in all the confusion."

Sherlock volunteered, "They don't keep very good drugs in ambulances. But I can send a text along to Bill Wiggins and get him to-"

"Mmm,  _no_ ," Molly said, "I'll be all right. But Sherlock, you have to learn that not everything that goes wrong for the people around you is your fault. You just have to do your best with the things that  _are_  your responsibility and hope that it works out otherwise."

"I suppose so."

Molly folded her hands in her lap, and asked, "So… you love me?"

"Apparently."

"Like proper  _in love_  love me, not like "Oh, I love Thai food" or anything?"

"Yes. I don't even like Thai food."

"Huh."

She looked up at him, and asked, "So now what?"

Sherlock sighed, "No idea. This is the absolute definition of 'not my area.' I had rather hoped you might have some suggestions."

Molly pursed up her lips and thought about it for a minute, then said, "You could probably kiss me and we'll see how it goes from there."

So he did, until eventually Sally came back to let them know the flat was safe.

* * *

Doctor Donoghue was an older man, with iron-grey hair, a neatly kept goatee, and an Irish accent. Like all therapists he had a low voice, a soothingly decorated office, and radiated serenity.

Unlike the last therapist, he wasn't one of Sherlock's relatives. John had made  _very_  sure. This had  _not_  been an easy referral for him to get and he wasn't leaving any precautions untaken.

"What I like to do at these first sessions," the therapist said, "Is begin with little… capsule autobiographies, just so we know a bit about one another and why we're here. I'll go first. I'm Charles Donoghue. After leaving university in 1975 I received an officer's commission in the army, where because of my accent and aptitude I was solicited to work in covert operations in the troubles ongoing in northern Ireland at the time.

"I infiltrated the IRA in 1977 and spent four years undercover, followed by other dark ops missions in various nations in western Europe. On six occasions this involved my taking the lives of other human beings. During the course of my career in intelligence I saw firsthand the profoundly negative effect it had upon people in the profession: the high rates of depression, PTSD, alcoholism, the gamut. Thus when I left active field service in 1995 I returned to Oxford, where I received a master's degree in psychodynamic counseling and a doctorate in social intervention.

"Now, I have the dubious distinction of being the only person in the UK with a top-level MI5 security clearance… who is  _also_  a licensed marriage counselor."

He beamed at John and Mary as they sat on his (aggressively beige, aggressively pleasant) couch. Mary looked at John with a gaze  _impregnated_  with wifely WTF. She'd never been in therapy, wasn't used to this sort of thing, so John took over to show her how.

"I'm John Watson. I was RAMC for fifteen years, mostly in Afghanistan though I did my medical qualification here at home. I got invalided out when I was shot, developed a psychosomatic limp, came home, and started working as a GP and assisting a consulting detective. I married Mary, and we have a little girl, Rosie, who's a year old. I've killed… three men, in my life. And I'm here because…"

He took a deep breath.

"Because I have a hard time dealing with human failings. Everybody's… but hers, in particular. I've got a  _really_  violent temper. Like dangerously bad. And I've found monogamy, um, trickier than I expected."

They both looked at Mary, who rolled her eyes.

"I'm Mary Watson. I started off in the CIA but then went freelance and founded a covert operations group called AGRA-"

"Ooh, I've heard of you lot," Donoghue said, impressed.

"Where I worked until about seven years ago when we disbanded and/or died and I took up a new identity and started working as a nurse. John didn't know any of that when we got married but he found out about a month after because in the course of trying to avoid having my secrets revealed I shot his best friend. Currently I'm a housewife because I recently got shot trying to save said best friend. I'm here because I tend to try to solve all my problems by lying  _about_ , running away  _from_ , or shooting  _at_  them."

She was being flip, but Donoghue didn't bite. He just prompted her to continue, with an, "And-?"

Mary looked at the carpet.

"And I've killed more people than you two combined. Can we leave it at that?"

"I honestly don't mind  _that_ so much," John commented.

"Oh  _good_ , I was worried," Mary snapped sarcastically.

"It's true, though. It's all the rest of it."

"Ah," Mary said, quietly.

John reached over and took her hand.

"We  _do_  love one another," he said to the therapist.

"Yeah. Quite a lot, actually," Mary agreed with a sigh.

"Well there's no better place to begin," Donoghue smiled.

* * *

"I cannot  _believe_  you kept the bloody thing."

"It cost nearly two thousand pounds, John."

"So, like,  _one_  of your suits? It's  _morbid_."

"It's  _practical._  I'm certainly going to need it again at some point and Mycroft was clever enough not to include my dates, so why not save it for reuse? In the meantime Molly uses it to roll out pastry crust."

"Actually, I tried, and it's a bit bulky and inconvenient,  _and_  the "Sherlock Holmes" gets in the way when I want to do big stuff," Molly replied from the kitchen where she was stuck arranging dishes in the newly-installed cupboards despite being the second-shortest person in the flat, "So I mostly just use the refrigerated countertop at mine."

"You two-" John hesitated, "It's just really good you two found one another, is all."

"I agree," Sherlock said smugly.

"For the benefit of the rest of society."

"Oi, Baker Street boys,  _shut up_ ," Mary said in a quiet intense voice, "I think Rosie's going to go for it."

The  _shortest_  person in the flat had met all her other milestones handily but was rather delayed in  _walking_ , which had caused a lot of anxiety on the part of her parents, godparents, and everyone unfortunate enough to enter their orbits and hear  _all_  about it. But now she was standing in the center of the living room, staring fixedly at John and Sherlock who were trying to level a heavy painting to Mary's instructions.

The two men lowered the painting and each took a knee as Molly limped out of the kitchen to watch.

"Rosie? Can you come to Daddy?" John coaxed.

"Come to Uncle Sherlock, Watson," Sherlock commanded.

"You know you sound  _exactly_  like General Melchett in  _Blackadder_  when you talk to her?"

"You'll see, John," Sherlock said.

Rosie, stiff-legged and unsure, took her first steps, tottering to begin with, but then with more confidence. Without any particular difficulty she made it to the other side of the room, where she ignored both father and godfather and instead started fiercely gnawing on the corner of the skull painting they'd been trying to hang.

Mary smiled wistfully, and said, "That's my girl."

"That's not lead paint, is it?" Molly asked.

* * *

John was  _almost_  asleep when he heard quiet footfalls on the staircase. There was a creaking of the old hinges, and he could see Mary's silhouette in the dim light from the hallway, before she closed the door behind her and locked it and let the dark back in.

She joined him on the bed, and said, apropos of nothing, "So I had a really good checkup today."

"Did you?" John asked.

"I did. The doctor says I can go back to work… just desk stuff, and just for four hours at a time to begin with, but then more as I feel up to it. I can drive again, and exercise lightly. And I can resume 'all other normal activities, as indicated.'"

John ran his hands along the smooth skin of her thighs, past the silk of her pants, up her sides under her nightshirt. He stopped when the fingertips of his right hand were just barely grazing the curving scar left by the surgery that had saved her life.

"And what normal activities would those be?" he asked, though he had a pretty clear idea, obviously. In an experience of women that extended over many nations and three separate continents, he'd never found that they climbed into bed with you and straddled your crotch in order to ask you to empty the cat box.

Mary laughed quietly above him.

"I think that 'normal' for you and me isn't  _quite_ what the doctor had in mind. Some more marriage counseling… I'm looking forward to 'how to fight effectively without taking the nuclear option' next week. Some interesting crimes to solve, I hope. Ideally no more unexpected friends popping out from my past life. And it might be fun to take Rosie up to the lake district this summer and do a bit of camping."

"All that sounds-" John hesitated, "Lovely. Really lovely."

"But for  _tonight_  I was actually just thinking it'd be nice to have some sex."

"I can probably help with that."

"Oh, good. Teamwork is  _so_ critical in these things."

* * *

This time when the DVD arrived, six months after the aquarium, six months after it all changed, Mary was alone. The usual suspects that might have been with her were, respectively:

-Solving crimes.

-Keeping people from murdering said crime-solver.

-Conducting an analysis on the stomach contents of a fifty-year old poisoning victim, and feeling an odd craving for Kung Pao chicken, which had been his last deadly meal.

-Enjoying a justified nap after a challenging morning spent trying to work out the  _goddamned_ stackable cups.

-Just sparking up a pinhead jay now that the laundry was done.

It was in a little padded  _par avion_  envelope, and had been sent to the address, rather than the person, so Mary went ahead and opened it up. She honestly had completely forgotten about it until she saw the little block-printed "Miss you."

Mary's eyes widened, she exclaimed, "Oh,  _sod!"_ and as quickly as she could manage she tossed the thing into the bin.

A shiver ran up her spine, and Mary dry scrubbed her hands on her trousers. That was  _spooky_.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all there is. Thank you so much for reading/subscribing/reviewing. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed writing it!


End file.
